


The Angel Gabriel

by writexie



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Office, Angels, Archangel Gabriel (Supernatural), Buffyverse - Freeform, Comedy, Detectives, Email Systems, Gen, Kung Fu, Novel Length, Police, Sunnydale, Tamil, The Office, Vampires, ePub, handbooks, middle managment, mobi, office space, short novel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-08-06
Packaged: 2018-02-10 02:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 22,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2007936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writexie/pseuds/writexie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Angel Gabriel wakes in a tree in Sunnydale, California. He has a pounding headache. He’d gone to sleep in Prauge and what then? He'd been moved, obviously. The only things capable of moving him were other Angels. He pictured himself in some depressurized air freight cabin, drool freezing on his face while six Angels drank cheap wine and shared magazines in First, ordering those little mechanical watches that they loved from the inflight catalog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress. Some scenes are taking longer than expected.Thanks for reading and thanks for your patience. I'll test this for readability in .epub form every so often. I'd like to structure the whole thing as a short novel (maybe 250 or so pages) for easy download to a reader.

 

 

 

**"Earth." Encyclopedia Angelica Platinum Edition (Available only through Heavenly Shopping Network™)**

 

  1. Small planet
  2. [Classified]: Created to patch a hole in ADVANCED DELIVERY network
  3. [Classified]: Home to fallen Middle Management Angels between the GREAT REORGANIZATION and  the second GREAT REORGANIZATION
  4. [Classified]: Home to NGN Signal Transfer Point linking closed Middle of Sun (mOs)  network to Heavenly Security Monitoring System (HsMs)



 

A good fraction of humanity divides history into BC and AD. For this fraction, BC stands for “Before Christ” and AD for “Anno Domini.” Recently the usage has been cleaned up and BC has been replaced by BCE, which stands for “Before Current Era'” leaving us in the middle of “CE” or current era.

BC and AD have their parallels in heaven but refer exclusively to the advent of the most complex interdepartmental email system in the history of all creation. In this context, BC stands for “Before Communication” and AD stands for “Automatic Delivery.” These terms have not been updated so there is no equivalent CE in this context.

In Earth terms, this email system was built during the early Cambrian period,  installed during the Cretaceous period and desperately patched right up until the last major reorganization at the time of Jesus. During the beta testing and great post launch recall  period messages were constantly getting sidetracked to dead accounts or lost in spacetime, popping up at unfortunate intervals and, occasionally,  in unfortunate places on earth. Angels were sent down to intercept and correct these messages, preventing in the process several floods and the destruction of the world by fire but accidentally knocking down the tower of Babel, flooding the region around Arat, and inspiring several dozen prophets. These incidents stopped with the release of the more stable 7.0 version of the email system during the Great Reorganization but errors still occur. The last recorded instance took place in New York in 1848, when John Humphreys, founder of the Oneida Community, intercepted discount dinnerware spam sent- apparently- to the record maintenance division in heaven from a set of illicit advert specialists located in the demon world in the center of the sun.

 

There is a rumor that the Dinosaurs were wiped out as the result of an email handling exception but this is not true.

 


	2. Anand Chandrasekaran

 “Oh Jesus and Mamoothi preserve me, come under him, what are you doing?”

On the television, a boxing match: Oscar De La Hoya vs. David Kamau at the Alamodome in San Antonio. Kamau was fishing for De La Hoya with his left hand, weaving. Instead of engaging, De La Hoya moved back steadily with a little side to side motion. He’d step back just as Kamau threw each spastic jab.  Kamau: 95 punches thrown in the first round and 16 landed. De La Hoya: 34 thrown and 12 landed. Kamau was fired up. De La Hoya was waiting. 

Anand Chandrasekaran pushed himself back into his recliner and balled his fists at his chest as the round 2 bell rang. A week after he’d arrived in Chicago his cousin had taken him to see Sugar Ray Robinson fight Gene Fullmer at the Chicago Stadium and while he’d missed the perfect punch he remembered Fullmer’s chopping downward lefts and stayed with the sport through his move to Sunnydale and his marriage to his second wife, Loretta.

“That’s right, that’s right”

He had twenty dollars riding on a knockout before the 4th. De La Hoya improved in the second with a left hook under the ribs and then a second to this chin and then a steady push. Kamau jabbed twice and then faded, stumbling forward, leaning. A lesser man would have taken a knee. The first round had looked “for the distance” but it was clear the De La Hoya—two months after the Whittaker fight—was in no mood to prolong the match. A left uppercut inside and Kamau went down.

“Waaah!”

High and low again and a single good jab to De La Hoya’s chin and De La Hoya countered and Kamau was finished in the second. Anand followed a telegraphed punch and  De La Hoya paused and leaned up against Kamau and Anand Chandrasekaran clutched his fists and said “Ayeoh, not  again” but it wasn’t again and Kamau went down. Anand was up, raised fists, “Woooooo!”

“Did you win, Hon?”

“Eighty dollars!”

“You boxing as well now babe?” She’d poked her head out of the kitchen doorway and had caught him up in a boxer’s stance. Anand flinched and dropped his arms.

 

He hadn’t been thinking of a boxer’s ring. Instead, he'd remembered a grimy room on Chicago’s west side; a room whose carpet was long gone and where the grit on the walls might have shadowed the ropes for their height and weight. A small time crook in the corner. Anand was hitting him. Left straight, right straight, left straight, right straight, until a nearby officer pulled him off. The perp had run up some rickety wooden stairs, evading pursuit and Anand’s partner had just put a foot through one of the risers, breaking his ankle and then his arm. Anand, following, had seen him go down just before leaping ahead and cornering the perp in that room. 

In Anand’s mind there were perps everywhere. There were perps in the Alamodome in San Antonio, watching the De La Hoya fight. Some of them were probably ringside, dark glasses on, jacket collars pulled up. Officers in Chicago used the term. “We have a 10-31 on South Park Terrace, two perps, on foot seen entering house” followed by a “Officer Chandra calling: 10-26, second perp running on foot.” Nobody said perp in California and the codes were different and it seemed like there were just two of them: 187, 287, 187, Homicide, Kidnapping, Homicide. When asked about his early days as a detective, Anand described Chicago as a boxing ring. You’d pursue a suspect, push him from one room to the next or off a side street and down and alleyway. You’d reach out, probe,  jab, and collar him, or else you’d wait patiently for some criminal to tire himself out.

And now, two thousand miles and two time zones away from that, what was Sunnydale, California?

A circus, maybe. A pack of Mayberry clowns in boxing gloves. Anand had been there for five years. He was one of them. “ _Thaanoombi thevidiya paiyan_ , half the staff in this _poolu_ town.” Anand started, looked through the window and then sat back down in his recliner.

 Sunnydale had eight times the murder and disappearance rate of any surrounding jurisdiction. Robbery was down. Rape was unknown. Domestic assault was well within normal bounds. This failed to mean anything. Homicides were so spectacular. Slit throats and stab wounds to the neck. This could be you, please turn to page 6. List of the missing on page 10. Eldercare kidnappings, adultnappings, kid-kidnappings (pet-nappings were strangely within bounds). The Sunnydale examiner enjoyed record sales for such a small town. City commissioners as far away as Nevada and New Mexico read the paper the way elderly aunties read the obits: equal parts fascination and schadenfreude.

 

Anand moved to Sunnydale after 22 years on the Chicago Police Force. He’d cut his teeth as a patrol officer near Grant Park and then moved to the bureau of investigative services as a robbery detective five years before establishing himself as a gang inspector. Vijay, the cousin who had dragged him to the Robinson/Fullmer fight, quit his job and became a patrol officer as well. They’d shared a flat in West Ridge with a third cousin and eventually, with Anand’s first wife who’d arrived from Chennai in January wearing a cotton sari and who  never forgave Anand for his taste in weather.

Anand thought about that first marriage in Chicago and then he crossed himself and craned his head back over the edge of the recliner, looking for Loretta. The post-fight commercials ended and the news came on and someone reported a balmy 80 degree Tuesday evening in Sunnydale. Anand could tell. The windows were open and the oscillating fan clicked back and forth. At least once a week, Anand pushed the television away from the window in order to set up a downstairs cot near the fan while Loretta, utter Californian by way of New Jersey, sealed herself in the bedroom with the air conditioner. Out of habit, he’d wake himself at two or three in the morning in order to review case files on the dining room table. As it was, the alarm failed and so he slept  until a newspaper hit the front door at six.

THREE BOYS STILL MISSING, details page 7. Photo page 1. Two Franconi kids and one Showalter kid stared out into the middle distance, Sears-Catalog-ready triangle formation. The older Franconi kid stood in the back, collarbone above the younger two. He had a guiding hand on the shoulder of the Showalter kid. How did the newspaper even get this sort of photo? Did they work a deal with the school yearbook committee. Extra money for group shots of those students voted “most likely to die or disappear?” Lonnie Showalter’s parents would be calling. Did he see the article? Yes. Had anyone called in with any tips? It was 6:45 in the morning, give it a few hours. The Franconi parents were quieter. Forty-eight hours after their kid disappeared and twenty-four hours after the Showalters visited the station, they walked up to the front desk and asked for the person in charge. The Chief sent them over. Anand was the only detective on the Sunnydale police force and so he was the default lead on the investigation. “Find out where they are and who did this,” they said, “We’ll call in to check.” They turned in unison in their matching suits—is it bad for the wife, husband, and six in-laws to have matching suits?—and walked out of the station. Each time he called or visited with an update, Mr Franconi or one of the uncles would say “We thank you for your efforts.” What did that mean? It implied that something bad might happen if his efforts weren’t thankable.

Anand Chandrasekaran’s efforts weren’t at all thankable from the perspective of the Sunnydale Examiner. THREE BOYS STILL MISSING was the best of the front page headlines. It had been preceded by: THREE MORE KIDS: ANOTHER UNSOLVED CASE; SUNNYDALE POLICE: WHY ARE WE WASTING OUR MONEY; and DETECTIVE CHANDRA: THROWN OUT OF CHICAGO? Each article was a font of hysterical, slanderous rhetoric, much of it supplied by the same smiling people who offered Anand extra baked goods at the Sunday morning church parking lot breakfast buffets.

There was a second newspaper on his desk at the station. The Franconi kids stared at Anand from an angle, perched against a blinking pushbutton phone.

“Hello, this is Anand, yes yes Ms. Showalter, I read the article. No, we still are collecting evidence. Yes, I mean no, we didn’t lose any of the evidence. Everything is still open Ms. Showalter, no we have not received any requests that we know of. Yes we have interviewed Lonnie’s classmates. I’m sorry Ms. Showalter, as soon as we have a good lead we will track this out. We are doing everything we can to get that lead. No, the Chief is not giving you the runaround, yes 100% I’m running this case. We‘ve contacted state and federal authorities, no they have not assigned anyone to the case.”

Anand didn’t tell her that state and federal authorities received fifteen to twenty references a month from Sunnydale. The California Highway Patrol had asked the Sunnydale station to dial in on a special line that ran directly to voicemail.

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry Ms. Showalter. I’m reviewing the case with the Chief this morning. I’ll call you later today with an update. Yes, yes, Mrs. Showalter. We are working as hard as we possibly can.”

 

Anand responded to these and other irritations (jokey fake Indian accents, burned coffee,  lack of Appam for breakfast, North Indian Thali sets for lunch, the assumption that he owned a convenience store) with a small portfolio of twitches and habits that calmed him while—he imagined—communicating his irritation. He had a habit of cupping and then rubbing the entire lower half of his face with long narrow fingers whenever he detected bullshit. When he did this, it looked like an Amazonian bird-eating spider was attacking his head. When he was irritated he would count to ten in German on his fingertips. When angry he’d place his hands to each side of his head and fling them up, as if he was taking off an explosive hat. His belly after forty eight years winked out above his belt and gave him a heavy persona:  the beefiness of a wrestler or an Irish mobster on the make. His size made the face spider hand flinging more shocking than it should have been.

The Police Chief was less imposing than Anand. Habitually stiff but possessing an exactly unremarkable height, the chief was reed thin and cheery. His erect posture threw his neck out and gave his smile an unintentional rictus effect. He’d shoved a pile of manila folders to one side of his chipped formica desk and was pouring a single cup of water back and forth between two whiskey glasses when Anand entered his office.

“Chandra, you know why I like working with you?”

“Why is that sir?”

“Because you listen, Chandra, and you try real hard. You read the paper? (Anand nodded) I’m sure they called, you were talking to them on the phone? (Anand nodded) Okay okay, I have news on that case and also on the Pearson file and maybe the Baxter.”

“All three, sir?”

“Yeah yeah, all three”

He set the whiskey glasses down and craned to see Anand over the files.

“The school janitor ran into the Baxter kid. He was trying to drag some elderly woman into the bushes near the gym. The Baxter kid dropped her and ran off.”

“The woman?”

“Yeah, Ms. Pavlova. She used to scare the hell out of me in third grade. She’s fine. Twisted her arm. She said that there were three boys who confronted her. She named one of the Franconi kids immediately and then she eye-deed the Pearson sister when we showed her some sketches.”

“Did anyone else spot them?”

“Not a sign. We sent a car out to the school about an hour before the regular patrol.”

“So they’re gone, What was she doing there?” Anand cupped a hand over the lower half of his face

“Some church function. Lets out in the evenings. It’s not the first time. You know all of these kids turn up”

“And disappear again.” Anand sighed “Where are they going? Some hideout? Nobody at the bus station saw them?”

“You know the bus station. I’d keep someone there 24x7 if we could get an extra officer. They are supposed to have a camera in there but nobody ever seems to turn it on or keep track of the tape. Regular shit, right?”

He lifted one of the whiskey glasses and paused before dumping the contents into its neighbor.

“Don’t tell the parents. No use getting their hopes up. Same as always, it’s a lead if they hear and ask but it hasn’t gone anywhere”

“Will Pavlova talk Sir?”

“Yeah, of course she will. We can’t ask her not to talk.”

Anand stooped even lower. “This means another article on the Examiner”

“Yeah.” The Police Chief smiled. “That’s why we hired you.”

 

Anand’s desk was a perfect reflection of his Sisyphean investigative efforts. He’d come in on Sunday afternoons and file and refile that weeks’ ream of open but not dead cases. As the week progressed, manila folders would pile on top of ledgers and police report printouts from as far away as Miami. He had three books on criminal profiling—all green—that he’d ordered in a burst of professional enthusiasm and another six on procedure. The manila folders came in waves and washed around the books as the stack breached and listed to the side. By Thursday the desk was a mess. He sorted the files into disorganized stacks and ignored them, choosing to jot ideas and interview quotes into a spiral reporters notepad.

 

The rest of the station was no better. Walk past the sanitized waiting and interview rooms, each with a vase of plastic flowers, and you’d notice that the stained ceiling panels tended to crumble at the edges in a visible effort to draw away from the spastic fluorescent lights. A cost saving measure, the lights flickered incessantly in one corner of the records room, giving an impression of a disco designed around faded brown office carpeting. Caulder and Caulder had been given the disco desks and were now sharing space with Penfield and Rosen who enjoyed steadier lighting in the second room. Penfield and Rosen had been with the station long enough to become resigned to the intractable disorganization and never bothered cleaning their own mountains of paperwork. There was a chance that they did not notice the Caulders, who had cleared space by removing and shredding stale file folders from the trailing edge of Penfield’s desk. Everyone had their own file management system.  Crawley, his cube mate, lined folders up between mouldering coffee mugs while Greene— two desks down with his football trophies and pennant banner stapled to the divider— maintained a perfectly clean desk by shoving all paperwork into the drawers. The long line of filing cabinets on the far edge of the office lacked keys. A trainee once managed to bend three of the panels with a crowbar while trying unsuccessfully to access some old records but then gave up. The crowbar was still on top of the filing cabinet gathering dust. Someone would attempt to open the cabinets again just as soon and the new California police record digitization money came in.

 

Anand kept long rows of pictures stapled to the divider in his own cubicle. This helped him during those days when it seemed impossible to focus on the cases. One face after another. How did so many people disappear? All of the cases were connected, a least by circumstance. The missing kid in case A was taken in by the grandmother in case D after his Mom and Dad split up. During that time, he went to school with Case H while grandma worked alongside case K. In a city of 38,000 you might not know the stranger at the laundromat but you probably knew his sister or his aunt or his college roommate. Every newcomer seemed to have cousins here. Maybe it was a California thing. Driving home for lunch in the afternoons, Anand saw clean streets and trimmed lawns. During summer vacation, teenagers stood outside washing their first cars or babysat in the yards, filling up kiddie pools for the neighbors. The same teenagers would run electric wires to white plastic Christmas trees in December and line up faithfully for the February Precancerous Cell Detection Walkathon.  In the evenings, he’d see couples amble down the streets to the Sunnydale Cinema. They might watch a movie or they might eat at the Italian, French or Turkish restaurants or browse the two art galleries. Sunndydale was entirely pleasant. Even the murders were clean. A person would disappear for a week and show up in an alleyway with a broken neck and no bleeding or sign of struggle. Several entrepreneurs had set up crime scene cleaning businesses only to leave for lack of work. Now, Sunnydale was down to one, run by the same family that managed Sunnydale’s largest nursing home. There had never been a gunfight. You’d never see a gang. Even the graffiti was minimal, cheery, and painted over by the Sunnydale Lions Rotary.

And such confusion at the station! A an urban planner might look at the overflowing file folders and the dented filing cabinets and hesitate, just as a good doctor might hesitate at the sight of a mole—just a shade too dark—on the otherwise perfect shoulder of a runway model. How much, he might wonder, was hidden under the surface and was it reasonable to operate? A dedicated bulletin computer blinked as news reports from San Bernardo and other surrounding cities filtered in. For every blink four or five folders seemed to pop out of the ether. To clean this out? It would take a staff of fifty. Anand handled this the way every other officer handled it. He stayed out of the office, driving through the neighborhood streets for eight to ten hours out of each 12 hour shift. He’d sit at the bookstore coffee shop, he’d talk to the old guys at the nursing home on Tavena St or watch the high school football team at summer practice while he conversed with parents and spare teachers. This was called gathering information. Occasionally some kid would blow by him in a loud car or he might on a great day see some kid at work with a marker or can of spray paint. As a detective, he called these in. Forty-five minutes later, one of the patrol officers would arrive, fishing gear tucked into the trunk. The delays had upset Anand right after his arrival from Chicago but now it seemed to be part of the pattern of the whole town.

 

In this sense, returning home that evening to find a man digging around in the trash next door was a great victory.

 

The trash diver was maybe in his forties, wearing a flannel shirt, hair uncombed, no glasses, earrings, necklace or any other identifying paraphernalia, the guy had a sailor rat scruffiness about him. He might have cleaned septic tanks and restocked bait at one of the docks south of Sunnydale. He’d repaint those tourist marlin boats on the off season. Not that anyone looks like a concert pianist while rooting around in the trash.

“Hi, Hi…excuse me…Sir… SIR, can I help you with anything?” Anand kept the car between himself and the stranger.

The man glanced up at the second “Sir” while keeping his arms fully immersed in the garbage can. He might have been trying to turn a calf in breech during delivery. He smiled, a big television preacher smile

“Just a second, I’ve almost got this…”

“Anand, honey, that’s Gabe, our new neighbor.” Loretta called over from the porch.  “Come inside. He’ll be over for dinner.”

Just then Gabe jerked back and grunted, hoisting a dingy toaster out of the garbage can. He set this down on the driveway and looked back into the can as Anand walked over.

“It still works. No idea why it got thrown out.” Gabe said this while staring at the can as Anand swiveled around the front of the car. He straightened up over the can, a speck over 6ft in height.

 “Anand Chandrasekaran ” Anand, conscious of the trash, did not offer his hand. He noticed that Gabe’s arms were completely clean.

“Hi Anand, Gabe Cohen… I… just moved in” Gabe offered his hand and then stopped midway and turned to look back at his house.

Anand forced a smile “Welcome, welcome, that house has been open all summer.”

“Really, what? The agent told me that it had just gone on sale.”

“Ha, I saw a sign in the yard back in May. Could have been for something else. Mr and Mrs Kauffman—the people who owned it—started keeping to themselves. We were surprised when the sign went up.”

“The agent said something about moving to San Bernardo”

“That happens. Mostly younger families or kids just out of college though.”

“Empty nest” Gabe said.

“You have family?”

“Divorce,” Gabe paused, “I picked up this house to make it easier to get the kids. Near a high school. Good university. This place has everything. The kids are with my ex right now but we will work something out.” He picked up the toaster and stared at it. The late afternoon sun flashed against the toaster’s metal exterior, blotting out his reflection. Looking up he gave Anand another preacher smile. Fifty watt Anand thought this time. The other fifty were probably on reserve. Reduced power consumption he thought, hits everyone differently.

“Are you a preacher?”

“Preacher? hell no. IT systems specialist. Why?”

“Well, you seem—“

Gabe shrugged, cutting him off. “Your wife told me that you were a detective. Ha. I should be easy to profile.”

Anand chuckled, uncomfortable, and said that everyone was easy to profile if you were willing to do the wrong profiles and then Loretta called over and invited Gabe to come wash his hands in the house and sit for supper.

 

After dinner had ended and after Loretta had tucked the last hamburger scraps in a plastic storage container and after Anand had finished his beer and cracked open a half-empty bottle of scotch and placed a vinyl Sonny Stitt record on his high fidelity player, the three proceeded to sit on the front porch and wile away the evening. Anand was sure that Gabe had to unpack the house but Gabe showed no signs of distress or impatience—no tapping the fingers, no sidelong glances toward his own driveway—and after the first half of the whiskey glass Anand no longer cared. Instead he told Gabe of his police days in Chicago, of his first collar (the perp turned and threw a chunk of cement at him and of course missed because it is first hard to throw a twenty-pound slab of cement and second doubly hard to throw a twenty-pound slab of cement while you are running through a bowling alley in a pair of stolen high heels); of the Sugar Ray – Gene Fullmer fight and of the first time he’d met Loretta. In the last story, Loretta had ended up out of gas in Sunnydale during the local Homecoming Parade for Sunnydale High School. Normally a parade like this would be a small deal—Anand said “small buttons”—but the High School had hired an energetic activities director four years earlier and the parade had scaled up over those four years from a few marchers in flannel shirts and distressed boots to a long line of classic automobiles, each towing a float, several of which involved fireworks. This drew most of the town to the parade route where they could eat corn dogs, win stuffed platypuses at the ring toss and enjoy discounted t-shirts with iron-on images of Olivia Newton John or beach bum messages like “Beer O’Clock?” To Loretta, just in from the East Coast, this was a new world. She’d last seen a parade during the Feast of Saint Anthony in Jersey City and a plaster statue carried by ten somber men in white t-shirts failed to match a twenty foot long Muppets on a Mississippi Steamboat float braced at the front between the fins of a Cadillac Eldorado in every way. She’d run across the tail end of the float line as the drivers waited in a big dirt parking lot near the Sunnydale gas station and walking over she’d talked to one of the drivers and then a float rider and then a float manager and then found herself shimmying into a gold costume that was supposed to represent one of the characters from Thundercats but which looked more Andrew Lloyd Webber than afternoon television. The Thundercats float was number thirty six out of forty and Loretta and the rest of the crew had plenty of time to drink before lurching the car—a 1958 Impala—onto the parade track and in order to weave along the route. Given the position toward the end of the parade line, the float manager felt that fireworks were necessary and so he’d worked with three students from the high school’s metal fabrication class to weave a big open mesh globe that could be covered in sparklers and whirling dervishes. It was not clear to anyone what the globe had to do with the Thundercats or whether the globe component had preceded or post-dated the Thundercats component but the globe looked good and the director was eager to mount it on a long, narrow flatbed that could be towed by the Impala. 

The rig worked, Loretta said, so long as the cast members braced the globe by hand. The metal fabrication students had done a terrific job welding the globe’s understructure but the float designer had decided that the whole thing could be mounted on a heavy Christmas tree stand. Lion-O told her that the stand had worked well enough when they tested it in the garage but the garage was not the road and it quickly became obvious that the globe would need to be hand-braced as the car rocked and jostled. As the globe began to rock, Lion-O and Panthro struggled to secure it while Loretta— then Cheetara— scrambled forward to rap on the trunk of the Impala. No success there. The float director failed to hear her and she saw him lift the Lightsure fireworks control wire as the car rolled into the packed parade route.

“Noo! I yelled and then wham! The entire globe went off and Lion-O and Panthro jumped right off of the truck. The entire globe erupted in a shitstorm of fireworks and rocked toward me and I was saying a prayer which was half a Hail Mary and Half a prayer to Saint Anthony when the Globe rocked back, snapped itself off of the base, dropped from the flatbed and began to roll along the parade route. I think that it was probably propelled by those dervish fireworks. They’d send out a huge arc of sparks each time they ended up on the bottom of the globe.”

Loretta paused for effect. Gabe could hear the crickets stirring.

“So you’ve got to see it. People are running, I mean running, every direction. The floats behind us are jammed up while the float just in front of us tries to get out of the way and ends up getting tangled in the next float ahead. The director opened the door to step out and dove back in as the fiery globe rolled past the car. Now he’s waving his hands and yelling into his phone and I’m standing there alone on the float and my Cheetara costume is wrinkled and drawn together in places where the heat singed the polyester and I’m just watching in this dispossessed sort of way, like it’s not really my problem. It’s the craziest thing. “

“At any rate,” she continued, “Crowds screaming etcetera, I see one lone car backing its way down the parade route, a Delta 88 right? Weaving left and right past two different floats before blocking the globe of fire which runs up in its trunk before bouncing back. The globe shudders to a stop against the car and Chandra steps out, cool as a cucumber. He gives the globe a long glance and even while it is burning the crap out his paint job he ambles over to the American Farming float and takes a pitchfork which he uses to roll the globe into a nearby drainage ditch where it burns out.”

“And that’s how – “ Gabe gave a seventy, maybe an eighty watt smile.

“The best part is that after he rolls the globe into the drainage ditch and gets the parade floats moving again he walks up to the director and tells him to drive the parade route as well. The director starts up the Impala and Chandra leaps on to the back. Lion-O is gone, Pantero is gone, Jaga I think is way back at the start smoking up. It’s just the two of us and he puts his arm around me and pulls me back to a standing position and before you know it, we are both waving at the crowd from the top of the this burned ass float and everyone is cheering for us. It was wild.”

“What a way to meet,” said Gabe. He turned to Chandra. “A good move, no?”

“She always tells it like that. It wasn’t so smooth. I tripped when I tried to climb up on the float. Took me three tries.”

Anand was silent after that and Gabe and Loretta followed him as the sound of a cricket big band floated up from the yard. After a moment Anand saw Gabe take a sidelong glance at the house and he interrupted the thought by asking Gabe about his work.

“Ah, it’s not as exciting as detective work.”

“Right, nothing is as exciting as filling forms in triplicate, what are you doing now?”

“Now, I just finished up a consulting gig. I have a few weeks break to move house before I start looking for a new one.”

After some coaxing, Gabe said that he used to work in telecom, with email systems but now he worked to clean databases. He’d cleaned up the  Section 8 database for the New York Housing Authority, for example, and he’d recently been in Los Angeles to Help Children’s Hospital with its billing system. There was good money in it, enough that he could take a few months off at the end of each job. Did he have a new job lined up? No, but it wasn’t that hard to find work. “I don’t want you to think that some out of work guy has moved in next door—“

“Not at all, I was thinking.”

“About?”

Anand hesitated before responding. He’d always had trouble talking about the Sunnydale Police force with outsiders. The same instinct that might tell him to check a particular room in an otherwise abandoned house also told him to keep the police office problems tucked close to his chest. Even when he spoke to Loretta he’d feel a pressure at the back of his neck. The pressure of hundreds of manila folders. Now, as he spoke with Gabe, the pressure took on a physical aspect. He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. Gabe watched him, curious, and then placed a hand on his shoulder, a kindly, neighborly gesture. The pressure on Anand’s neck cracked and broke. In his head, Anand saw hundreds of manila folders sliding to the floor from their perch on Penrose’ desk.

“About the Sunnydale Police Headquarters.” It was a relief just to say those words. Anand finished his whiskey as Gabe folded his hands back into his lap.

Anand described the police station. The filing system was a hideous mess. Would Gabe mind helping out? Anand was sure that there was budget hidden somewhere if an outside party could bring the police records under control. “I mean, I don’t even know where the manila folders come from. We don’t open three quarters of the folders. We can’t. There isn’t enough time in the day.” Were the folders mailed in from other police station or were they generated on premises? Anand repeated that he had no idea. Some of them probably arrived through the mail, the result of intercity or interstate requests. Others were probably printed out but he had no idea who might be doing all of the writing and printing. There was a central server. No, force policy prevented the station from disposing of the files. No, it was unlikely that anyone would track or miss the files but didn’t that sound irresponsible? “We need to see” said Gabe. He set his own glass down on the porch as he stood to take his leave. “Give me a few days,” he said, sounding noncommittal. He waved at his house as he stood “I have all of this to arrange.” With a crack and a pop a single firework sailed into the sky from the end of the street. Together, the three watched it blossom into a small fountain above the roofline before drifting and fading.

A car sped through the intersection at the end of the block and piled through four trash cans before smacking into a tree with a neat crunch. Dazed, the driver stumbled out of the car and looked skyward, waiting for the next round of fireworks. Anand stood up slowly, grunting with the effort.

“Summer Break,” said Anand. He started down the porch stairs.

“Summer Break,” said Gabe, who smiled the full preacher smile, a full one hundred watts.


	3. Gabriel Cohen

The Angel Gabriel was annoyed. He’d gone to sleep in 1950, near Prague’s Spanish Synagogue, only to wake in a tree in Sunnydale 47 years later. He’d been moved, of course, and the only thing capable of moving him were other Angels. What sort of passive aggressive school prank was this? You refuse to visit for 2000 years and then drag someone halfway around the world in order to leave them in a tree? He had a picture of himself in some depressurized air freight cabin, drool freezing on his face while six Angels drank cheap wine and shared magazines in First, ordering those little mechanical watches that they loved from the inflight catalog.

  
Gabriel enjoyed sleeping. It was novel. He’d slept in Kussara through the Hittite Middle Kingdom and later through much of the Qin Dynasty in China. He’d slept for years at a time in caves and under palaces and in sewer systems, mountains, fields, forests. He thought of himself as a professional, if unsteady sleeper. There is no particular reason for an angel to sleep. As management professionals, sleep meant time off task, missed meetings and poor teamwork scores during performance reviews. Too much sleep and a Seraphim would stop by to discuss the point system and those perks that you enjoyed. You like the small statue of yourself that was polished daily by a team of Tennin? You liked the regular awards plaques and recognition at cross-division events? You wanted your name and one of those real estate agent profile photos in one of the weekly Angelic newsmagazines? You weren’t going to get these things by sleeping. Sleep too much and you’d get a bad performance review. Two bad performance reviews and you might be called in for a career discussion. An assessment they called it. Gabriel had avoided these by taking hardship posts. He’d started by specializing in MacroSeraphic exchange and then, after showing up drunk to a performance review, he’d accepted the first hardship post that came along. Prehistoric insects and crabs were first discovering land when Gabriel was trapped on the Earth.

Well, prehistoric insects and Jesus. Slightly overweight at the time, Jesus wore short sleeve button down shirts over cheap dress pants, giving the impression of a very successful counter supervisor at a local grocery store.

  
“Okay, okay” Jesus looked around. They were one a beach under a massive escarpment in what was then Gondwala and what would become the coast of Angola in Africa. To the west; what was to become the Atlantic Ocean. Steam vents rent the earth for hundreds of miles to the east on the other side of the escarpment. “So, uh good job on the patch. This works right?”  
“Right” Gabriel was very enthusiastic in those days. “This will cure that floating decimal point error in the FORWARD/ BACKWARD module, so, ah, email corrections should propagate forward, generally, in spacetime”  
“Generally?” Jesus looked around and walked down to the waters edge while clicking his pen. Clik clik clik. “Seems unstable” He kicked over a horseshoe crab which lay flailing on its back. The crab scuttled back into the water. It’s ancestors would wait another 12,000 years before trying to come out again.  
“Well, it is a bit of an important patch. You are going to get all sorts of residuals”  
“Security?”  
“What?”  
“Security” Jesus looked irritated. “How secure is it”  
“Well, to force a message backwards in time, you’d need to make a personal visit to Earth.”  
“I’d need to visit or can anyone visit?”  
“No no, you’d need to visit personally. No clearance or access below you”  
“And?”  
“And the rest of the sequence is pretty painful. It might require temporary death. I can change that if you want”  
“Well, maybe. I’ll tell you later. Security is important” Clik clik clik. Red pen. “I’ll tell you what,” Clik. “You designed this system, you suggested that implementation would be finished prior to the launch of UNIVERSE 1.0. This is the last major patch. I want you to watch it. I’ll get back to you on the backward interface. Just wait here until then.”  
“But”  
“Shaddap.” Jesus pressed the butt of the pen into his forehead while closing his eyes. “This system. Do you realize that I am facing the first middle management revolt ever? Do you realize that I don’t, for the first time in the history of all things created anywhere do not have enough Seraphim to run HR?, do you realize?”  
Jesus’s stopped, and lowered his voice, eyes wild. His belly was pressing at the buttons on his shirt. “Look, this was a tough assignment, but damn Gabriel, you could’ve controlled expectations. If I let you back into heaven I’m gonna need to actually totally for real 100% sacrifice you at the Annual meeting and that would be bad for our innovation practice.”  
“But.”  
“So you are going to stay here. A few millennia. Tiny obscure planet on the edge of spacetime. Perfect placement for a patch. Nobody is gonna notice it. I may even stop by if there is trouble.”

Bang! And he was gone. A small laptop and a satchel of system repair tools in his wake. Gabriel, Archangel, the genius, badass designer of the ADVANCED DELIVERY system, was stranded on a dinky planet at the edge of the universe.


	4. Molly Malone

Big strong, cast-iron tub of a woman. High school teacher. You’d think “gym” at first but she taught math, which vied with physics for least popular high school subject. She’d spend hours in the cafeteria once the last lunch was over and after the tables had been cleaned. She’d pull a chair down from the stacks along the wall, spread a directory of technical math problems on the table and go to work. She did not go for theory. Instead, she preferred finding solutions for good partial differential equations which was to her something like knitting. Identify a likely pattern and clack away until something emerged.  She’d do this from the closing bell until the sports teams passed by the cafeteria on their way back to the locker rooms. Then she’d pack up, go shopping, and go home. Her husband was invariably in the back yard, working on chainsaw art. “Look Hon, a dinosaur” or “Look Hon, an elf stabbing a unicorn.” He had his own tastes. That’s why she married him. He’d insisted on a  sleigh rather than car for the wedding and it looked great until the runners bound up in the sticky July asphalt. There was a forty minute delay while one of the Caulder twins retrieved an ATV and hooked it up in the place of the horse which her husband had forgotten to shoe.

Summer break allowed her to spend extra hours in the cafeteria. She had a fondness for plastic chairs and the kitchen staff had given her a set of keys so that she could make coffee in the industrial sized carafe while she knitted away at her problems and thought about the students. ∂φ/∂t + ½ v2 + p/ρ + gz = f(t), for example, is the Bernoulli equation for unsteady potential flow. The sound of the students talking in the hallway, the squeaking of sneakers. The sound propagated in time, moves forward through the air like a liquid swirling around the spherical heads of the unaware. You could model it with the unsteady flow equation. Shamefully, smoking was no longer allowed in the school and so the raw motion of the air was impossible to see and to her this made the Bernoulli equation less meaningful.  ∂u/∂t - α(∂2u/∂x2 +  ∂2u/∂y2  +  ∂2u/∂z2 )= 0 was the heat equation. Place an angry student in a pile of happy friends and their anger would dissipate in three dimensions, absorbed by the other students until the problem was solved. She averaged 23 students per class five years ago. Last year was 19, now she was down to 17. She thought like this while she fiddled, filling in row after row of notebook paper, crossing out her mistakes and copying her small victories into clean sheets which she set aside.

There were kids in the school. She’d seen them that morning when she came in. They’d been skulking in the shadows behind the trophy cabinet in the main hall. Sneakers on the linoleum, kid jeans; faces obscured behind the Sunnydale Basketball Team Regional Champions 1978 trophy that dominated the left half of the cabinet. One looked like a Franconi kid but there were eight Franconi kids to choose from across three generations. Line them up and you could tell them apart by height. Beyond this, it was anyone’s guess. Maybe the parents could tell them apart. Ms. Malone had trouble picking out the lone daughter, who used to burst out in tears whenever Ms. Malone called her Carl. “It’s Carla!” she’d shriek “Carl is my bro-ther! Brother ! Brother! Brother!” If she got upset enough she’d make herself sick. Ms. Malone was not the only teacher to make this mistake. Carla was good with classes during track season and all but invisible otherwise.

Maybe the older postgraduate Franconi cousin was in school today, working in the guidance counselor’s office, misfiling reports and using—in the lightest possible ink—the “Your Child is Spawn of the Devil” stamp that she’d commissioned from the Stamp Factory on Harlan in San Francisco. Didn’t matter. Every kid breaks into a high school now and then. She’d forgotten about them by the time she’d filled in her first page of notes.

She remembered them seven hours later. The squeak of sneakers startled her, made her think that it was the end of a regular day. Had she really blown a whole afternoon on her problem sets? Don would be upset. Wasn’t she supposed to pick something up? A new water heater. Probably Don went into town to get it. Also a cake, there was a dinner reception for Mavis’ 80th birthday that night. Don and his sister had arranged for a dinner at the Italian restaurant because Mavis liked the wine and was now established enough to hit on the waiter which she did in an unnaturally genteel Southern Fashion that she’d adopted after the natural fashion had gotten the family banned from D’Souzas pizza for rampant ass grabbery. Molly trusted Don with the water heater but not the cake. He’d get one of those Pepperidge Farm refrigerated blocks whose frosting would cling to the plastic box liner, separating in layers like a wet phone book. She’d head home, ask Don about the dinner, throw out the Pepperidge Farm box, drive back into town, get another cake, clean up and go to the restaurant. Wait, clean up then drive into town. Wait, tell Joel over at the station that there might be some kids in the school after hours, clean up, drive into town, get cake and then dinner. Order of operations. The plan lasted until her car refused to start.

Jeb Molton was one block down from the school, on a ladder at Baxter’s Hardware trying to separate the auto parts from the gardening supplies in the third aisle. Plumbing equipment threatened him from the aisle across. “Hey Molly, how’s that drain router workin’ out?

“Fine Jeb, can I borrow your phone?”

“Sure thing, I got a new case of Thierry in while you’re at it. Pour yourself a glass.”

“Can’t, car’s busted and I’ve got to hurry back and buy a cake before dinner.”

“Better reason to have some wine then. What’s wrong with your car? Hey Gabe, you’re back”

A tall, gangly, sandy haired schoolteacher of a man walked through the door, closing it carefully behind him. “Hey Jeb” he said “heard a message that the cables were in”

“Yes, yes. It’s a lot of cable. How you gonna to carry it back?”

“My truck’s in the parking lot at the high school.”

“Good, I was afraid you’d try to walk. Heard you been walking everywhere. Molly’s car is over there was well. It won’t start.” Gabe looked over at Molly, who was using the phone at the counter and said “I can take a look at your car if you want” Molly nodded and then did a finger wave and a smile. Jeb, who had loved her from middle school, read the following four messages:

1) Hi, welcome to the neighbourhood. You are new?

2) Thanks for your offer on the car.

3) I’ll know whether I need help with the car in just a minute when I get off of this phone. It would be great if you could help me out. If we can’t get the car to work, then maybe you can give me a ride back though I don’t know you and so I won’t ask but I would be awesome if you’d offer. Don has a spare car in the driveway and so if you drop me off I can still pick up the car and the cake and make it to dinner.

4) All of the above but only if you have room in your truck with the cable and if you look like a safe driver.

“No worries,” said Gabe, “I’m a totally safe driver.”

Gabe and Jeb wheeled six spools of cable out to Gabe’s Red pickup truck. It was all Jeb could do to struggle the last of them up into the bed. After this Gabe walked over to Molly’s car and Jeb, clutching at his lower back, headed back to the store.

“Call me if you need anything. I got sparkplugs.”

Molly tried the car again, No dice. The starter would turn but nothing caught. Molly swore she had gas in the car. Maybe it was the distributor cap which, she ended up telling Gabe, made sure that the spark plugs sparked at the right time and in the right place. They had the hood of the car open and pinned back with a long coathanger of a pole when it started to rain.

It never rains in Southern California” said Molly.

“WHAHOOLGOLAH!” said a Franconi kid.

“WAAA” said a second kid a moment later. They had both jumped up on top of the car wearing monster masks. Rubber, Molly thought, cheap but applied well. They even had fangs. Was Crayton’s running a pre-Halloween special on monster masks? Maybe they’d mail ordered them.

“What are you doing?” said Molly.

“PREPARE TO DIE” the kids yelled in unison, leaping down at Gabe.

Poof! Poof! Both kids exploded in a cloud of sparkly dust as soon as they touched him.

“Sorry about that” said Gabe.

“AIIIGH” yelled Molly. “YOU DEMON!”

 

Donald Malone

Crackle. “Barry, this is Linda with Dispatch, can you get over to 23 Klose drive? We have a woman in a catatonic state. Her husband just called. She hasn’t moved for three hours. He says pulse is good and eyes are open and dilated but no movement. Can you check it out?”

Molly remained folded up, hands and legs drawn together, even after Don told her that he’d called an ambulance. She had been walking fine enough into the house when Gabe saw her off but once she was inside, she gathered herself up into a chair and refused to move. Don had to call Sylvia and tell her that he wouldn’t be able to come to Mavis birthday dinner.

“Don, you bastard, it’s just me, Cal, and mom now.” She’s gonna be upset and you were supposed to bring the cake.”

“Sylvia, I’m sorry, Molly is seized up.”

“What?”

“She’s not moving. Wouldn’t get dressed, wouldn’t say anything. This guy, Gabe, dropped her off and told me to check on the car and she seemed fine when she was dropped off but then she just seized up”

“You called the ambulance.”

Ambulance, police, and Jed over at the hardware store. He says that they left in his truck ten minutes before they arrived here. Her car is busted. I think it might be the distributor cap.”

“Don, fuck the distributor cap, is Molly all right?”

“The ambulance is on its way. Sylvia, it looks like a stroke. Don’t tell Mom.”

“Don’t tell mom? You idiot, of course I am gonna tell mom. We are all coming over.”

“Well, I got Pepperidge Farm cake”


	5. An Excerpt From The Vampire Handbook

VAMPIRE™ Ltd. (hereafter “Company”) has prepared this handbook to provide you with an overview of the Company’s policies, benefits, and rules. It is intended to familiarize you with important information about the company, as well as provide guidelines for your experience with us in an effort to foster a safe and healthy work environment. Please understand that this booklet only highlights company policies, practices, and benefits for your personal understanding and cannot, therefore, be construed as a legal document. It is intended to provide general information about the policies, benefits, and regulations governing the members of the company, and is not intended to constitute an express or implied contract. The guidelines presented in this handbook are not intended to be a substitute for sound management, judgment, and discretion.

It is obviously not possible to anticipate every situation that may arise in the workplace or to provide information that answers every possible question. In addition, circumstances will undoubtedly require that policies, practices, and benefits described in this handbook change from time to time. Accordingly, the company reserves the right to modify, supplement, rescind, or revise any provision of this handbook from time to time as it deems necessary or appropriate in its sole discretion with or without notice to you.

No business is free from day-to-day problems, but we believe our personnel policies and practices will help resolve such problems. All of us must work together to make the company a viable, healthy, and profitable organization. This is the only way we can provide a satisfactory working environment that promotes genuine concern and respect for others including all employees and our customers. If any statements in this handbook are not clear to you, please contact the company president or his designated representative for clarification. This handbook supersedes any and all prior policies, procedures, and handbooks of the company.


	6. MOLLY MALONE

On the morning of the third day back from the hospital, Don Malone walked downstairs fully expecting to see his wife drawn up in the leather wingback chair near the television. Instead, he found her making an omelette in the kitchen and he put his arms around her and pressed his forehead into the back of her neck while making a garbled “Ooh, you’re awake” sound.

“Don, what are you doing?” Molly was wearing a fresh bathrobe and when she twisted around, Don noticed that the thin lines in the skin under her collarbone had disappeared. The crows feet near her eyes and the longer lines between her nose and mouth had disappeared as well. No puffiness. She looked like she had slept for six months.

“Molly, you are up? What happened? We cancelled the dinner.”

“The dinner? That was days ago. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. Feeling better now” and she slid under his arms, finagled the omelette from the pan, popped two slices of toast from the toaster and sat down at the breakfast nook near the window. “Don, can you be awesome and get me some coffee? It’s done in the machine”

Don pulled his chair up next to hers and stared at her, placing the coffee mug next to her plate. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry love,” said Molly “Really, I feel terrific.” She stared out into the backyard where Don was working on a life sized reproduction of Luke Skywalker battling against Optimus Prime. Both figures were roughed out and floating in a sea of wood chips. “ I have a big favor though. Do you still have that lathe?”

“The lathe, yeah, it’s in the garage under a tarp. The bicycles are in front of it” Don became teary-eyed when he thought about their cycling plans for the California Coastal Highway. They bought the bikes and the maps but ended up driving to Big Sur and drinking their way through a dozen wine and cheese lunches spread out on one of Molly’s old quilts instead.

“Can you be totally awesome and make something for me?”

“Yeah, anything, what do you want?”

“I want some stakes.” She spread her hands apart the way a fisherman does when he describes the fish that he actually caught. “About a foot, maybe 15 inches. Sharp. Round is great but just a round tip if that’s easier.”

“Uh, what? How many?”

“200, maybe 300.”


	7. GABRIEL COHEN

Anand walked over to Gabe’s house just as soon as he’d said goodbye to Jeb and placed the phone down in its cradle. He should call Don, he thought. Don was probably busy but he should call him anyway. First he thought to walk to Gabe’s house and ask him for details. He left his house without bothering to take his gun or his badge.

Gabe was, at any rate elsewhere. No car in the driveway. Anand pressed the doorbell button, waited and then walked to the backyard. There, he pushed himself up on his toes and looked through the kitchen window. The house was spotless. He jiggled the kitchen door, which was locked. The dingy toaster, now polished, sat on a small table near just beyond the doorknob. Probably there was a side door. He tried that as well, turning the knob until it decided to give way and then pushing inward as he yelled “Hello?” The side door was empty save for six kitchen-island sized spools of cable and so Anand was forced to call out again when he opened the door leading into the house proper.

 

Like most of the houses in the neighborhood, Gabe’s house was a split level. Anand stood in the front room, checking the windows while marveling at the furniture that the Kaufmanns had left behind. Loretta had stopped by with a casserole two years ago. She had joined the Kauffman’s for a practice round of Bridge but lacking a fourth player, a formal game was impossible. Anand didn’t play Bridge but Loretta had learned the basics from her grandmother in New Jersey. She hadn’t played bridge since her years of awkward teenage Sundays and despite assuring the Kaufmanns that she would attend one of their formal games she’d gotten busy with her own work managing the local gym and so she’d failed to play any second proper game.  

 

So the house in time had been sold to a man last seen dropping off the now catatonic Molly Malone. Anand should’ve made a better effort to knock on their door and say hello. They would wave from the front yard when Anand was sitting on his porch but somehow the wave never turned into a conversation. What type of detective were you when you didn’t even keep track of the people on your block?  Probably Gabe had insisted that the furniture stay in place as part of the deal on the house. He’d have breakfast on the island countertop in the kitchen and then read a book while sitting in the wicker chair near the dining room table. Anand sighed and trudged upstairs. The chief would kill him if he found that Detective Chandrasekaran had been breaking into local houses without a warrant or a phone call to the station. Neighborly concern, he thought. Also, Gabe might be a psychopath who assaulted middle aged women while running a meth lab out of a second floor bedroom and it was Anand’s duty to investigate.

 

No meth lab on the second floor. The Master bedroom was completely empty.  The bathroom was empty as well and looked as if it had never been used. The second bedroom, at last, showed signs of life. Anand spotted two open suitcases on the floor, each brimming with clothes, tags still attached to collars and cuffs. On the table he saw a new PowerMac and an old NeXT station, side by side, a small NeXT cube bouncing back and forth on a large display screen. Anand was impressed. The police station had recently acquired an IBM PC in order to retype their records but Kyle Olsen had thrown up his hands after record 100 and said that it would have been easier to carve the records into rock with a toothbrush and so the police computer sat in place in a corner of the office until it was overcome by a wave of manila folders.  The Powerbook was switched off but the matte black keytboard on the NeXT station looked inviting. Ananad hesitated and then grasped the mouse and the screen refreshed. The computer, he saw, was fast enough to run Netscape. Probably Gabe had done something to improve the NeXT station’s memory. Anand used the down arrow on the keyboard to scroll through the Netscape search returns, discovering row after row of Map pointers. Here was a query for the electrical tunnels under Sunnydale, before that a query about the Sunnydale sewer system, before that a query about the High School. The mouse icon began to shake along the bottom edge of the screen and Anand realized that his hand was trembling. Six huge spools of cable and town maps. Anand had been reading a new Tom Clancy novel, one of the Jack Ryan vehicles, Executive Orders. Loretta had picked it up for him at the bookstore on State Street while walking back from the gym and Anand had spent the past two evenings reading himself to sleep in the downstairs ottoman. President Ryan might see the computers and the cable and deduce a looming terrorist attack but Detective Chandrasekaran was unable to make anything of it.  What sort of attack would you run with cable? Anand backed away from the computer, tripped over one of the open suitcases, and recovered in a crouch, alarmed, wishing that he had brought his gun and badge. The air in the house was utterly still and he was perspiring, the collar of his shirt becoming damp. He’d kicked open a book when he stumbled and he reached forward with one hand, turning a few pages before closing it. Nothing but weird lettering and diagrams in faded type. It was thicker than a phone book and seemed to click when he shut it. The book was too heavy to lift from his crouched position so Anand settled for rumpling the clothing in the suitcase. That would hide his footprint that he had left on Gabe’s new dress shirt, at least. Hopefully he wouldn’t wash his clothes anytime soon.

 

The Angel Gabriel was four blocks away, whistling to himself as he walked through the empty halls of Sunnydale High School. Ten days until the start of school according to a poster mounted near the entrance. Gabe wondered whether someone would show up to tear down and replace the paper number on the weekend. Probably not. The school felt close to opening. The halls were waxed, for example and the classrooms seemed neat. The building was huge for a high school, bigger than many of the universities in Czechoslovakia with row after row of lockers and clean tile floors that reflected the overhead lamps mounted in the ceiling. Outside he’d seen the high school football team finishing its summer practice. Football as so popular now. He’d seen exactly one game between Yale and Columbia in 1875 and then he’d left American soil for Europe. So much, he thought, changed in such short spaces of time. People remained the same, the same panoply of jerks, slackers, numbskulls and assholes, but everything else seemed to change.

 

Vampires, for example, he’d seem maybe a dozen since waking. The first had accosted him in an alleyway only to burst into a cloud of dust on contact. “Do you know the time?” the Vampire had asked and Gabe had checked his stolen wristwatch and then the Vampire, enjoying some sort of personal joke, said “Never mind, I know the time... time to die!” and then poof! He blew up like a glitterbomb. The Franconi kids had blown up in the same way, too young to sense an Angelic medium and too weak to tolerate Gabe’s touch. This youthful naiveté seemed particularly American.  The Prague Vampires, in contrast, maintained strict organizational controls and hid their youngsters. You’d never see anyone under 100 years of age walking about. The young ones were told to stay indoors and sharpen their typing skills under the mentorship of older vampires who would report up the middle management ladder until finally you’d reach some jackass or other who styled himself “The Original Vampire.” The Original Vampire had been a Neanderthal. He lived in Uzbekistan, raised miniature horses for food, and spent most of his time fashioning tiny obsidian spike boards that he’d slide under friends and enemies alike just as they sat down. Everyone hated him. What was that Uzbek term, _otti qtagi_ , a horse’s dick. He was an asshole. When Gabe finally captured Jakan he asked him about the Neanderthal, Jakan said that he’d been wound up by some prank or other—possibly he had stirred a mix of rotting fish and Shetland pony poo into Jakan’s prized MilleniaMinder planning binder—and Jakan had lost his cool and  bitten him as a result. In the tussle, the Neanderthal had managed to stab him with a spike board and lick some of Jakan’s blood. Instead of dying, he’d become enormously strong, strong enough to latch on to Jakan for a second, fuller dose.  The whole scandalous incident had taken place two hundred years earlier and the demon was still seemed embarrassed. His last words had been “Watch out for that guy. He’s gonna bite everyone, he’s an asshole.”  It’s bad when a demon calls you an asshole. True to form the Neanderthal not only survived his introduction to demonic blood but promptly started biting everyone he could find. There is nothing in this world like the constitution of a healthy Neanderthal. It took Gabe over a century to track him down and snuff him.

Gabe still looked on the first seventy millennia of Vampire chasing as a highlight. Back then a vampire could give you a real boost of energy, a wonderful shot of manna in the half second that it took to crystallize and disappear. Neanderthal vampires also tasted slightly better than their human successors. The difference was hard to define, the manna slightly more tannic with a wonderful smell of oak and loamy top notes. He’d only come to appreciate the difference after the Second Great Reorganization. The taste of Vampire Manna had become muddy and weak afterward and Gabe largely gave up hunting. Give it another thousand years and the vampires would be as weak as humans. Humans with little tolerance for the sun. The British then.  He hadn’t felt a thing when the Franconi boys disintegrated.

 

Gabe wandered into to the gym, tossed a few basketballs at the hoop on the far side of the court and then walked out. The switchgear appeared to be under the Library but the Library was occupied. Some Watcher sorting big leathery tomes, A man gifted by the Seraphic host with extraordinary powers of bureaucracy. The Seraphim’s own little gift toward an orderly universe. Gabriel avoided Watchers out of habit. Likely one of his great-to-the-nth-power granddaughters was in town as well. She could deal with him. Watchers seemed to swarm around his own grandchildren like tai tai’s to a discount mahjong table.

 

Gabe walked past the biology room, turned left and headed through a door marked ‘Maintenance’. One flight down and he was wandering among old creates in basement storage. A second door led to a room filled with metal shelving and a workbench and then a third door led to a set of stairs that wound down under the library. Gabe maintained his faultless whistle even as it began to echo in the storage rooms and fade as the passage twisted and narrowed under the school above. After a few minutes of walking, Gabe fumbled in his pocket and clicked a small flashlight. He didn’t need it but he’d been enamored with battery power since the 1920’s and he’d wanted to use the flashlight ever since he’d stolen it from Ralph’s Hunting and Camping on Market. After waving the light back and forth, he drew a brass compass case from his right pocket, Opening the case, he followed the movement of a fine 64-tetrahedral vector matrix assembled entirely of tiny bird bones that had been dipped in silver. The bones turned on each other in three dimensions while the lettering at the edge of the compass cast a pale light. Final result? The switchgear was one hundred meters ahead. It was embarrassing, Gabe thought, to be using such old technology when so many transistors were readily available but he hadn’t taken the time to update his repair manual and Jesus had banned him from all Angelic repair tools in a fit of pique over the great dinosaur extencion and so he’d been forced to make do with his own homebrew instrumentation.

 

Gabe held the switchgear detection dnd testing platform in front of his face and followed the myriad pointers until he was within one meter of the wall. There he paused. Inside the bubble, an older vampire was shrieking and trying to dig himself into the cave wall, waking the younger, sleeping vampires who found his panic contagious. Some of these vampires ran directly out of the bubble and returned without seeing anything. The older vampire seemed terrified, aware perhaps that a potential predator was only meters away.

 

The vampire in question was a middle aged  slightly potbellied jackass of a monster, part of some Roman circus troop who’d managed to get bitten after the Great Reorganization. Thoroughly useless. He could read but he wouldn’t know a Heavenly System Seven command if it bit him in the ass. It wasn’t even clear to Gabriel that he could just pull him out or kill him at the site without damaging the switch.

 

And how had he spent his time in the bubble? Poorly, from the looks of it.  No posters. No bookcase filled with employee manuals. No guidelines. None of the tracking forms for the humans that had been killed. There wasn’t even a mission statement on the cave wall. No equal opportunity biting policy. No VR office to give reviews and conversion approval. It was just the sort of thing that would piss off the European and Asian management to no end. It was the sort of behavior that earned you a slayer.

 

Gabe watched the vampires run several circuits in and out of the cave before he rested his hand on the spacetime bubble. This trip was strictly for examination. You could screw up the switchgear by stumbling around. The bubble was dense. It had heft. He cupped his hands around his eyes, looked into the blur, and frowned. The room was phased, not quite in the present where it might trap the other vampires like rats on a glue strip. Maybe it was still fixed at the point of creation. Maybe a second dimension was involved. It seemed complicated. According to his manual, the switchgear was a standard-type, used to route messages according to the Heavenly system 7 protocol. It supported data transfer from the earth to the demonic world in the center of the Sun. It was also used as a forwarding point for Heavenly commands. Possibly demons had been testing it, trying to work a new route for their sun chariot polishing and feather regrowth formula adverts. Sending it out of phase was a real feat of engineering though. Phased switch environments had a creepy way of back propagating messages in time. “Tricky” Gabe said to himself. He’d probably installed the switch when he was trying to patch the Advanced Delivery system. HS7 switches didn’t support the MacroSeraphic Exchange Server packets but you could rig it to send short test messages. He wondered why he had done this. He couldn’t remember installing the switchgear at all.

 

Not that he cared at the moment. It looked like he’d need to extract the vampire first and then set about repairing the switchgear. How the hell was he going to do that? It wasn’t like he could walk in and drag the vampire over the barrier and it wasn’t a good idea to kill the vampire inside. He’d need to think. He tapped the bottom edge of the flashlight against his teeth while the old vampire shuddered away from his wall pit, tripped and fell into a watery pool, shook himself like a dog and began to run laps from one side of the bubble to the other, yowling back and forth. Some of his assistants ran and yowled with him. Others watched passively. It was just a fit, they said in low whispers. You could get fits after spending sixty years in a dank subterranean pit. That’s what you get when you hang out with eighty-year olds thought Gabe. Sixty years was nothing. He considered sixty years a short nap.

 

Now a younger vampire had wrapped his arms around the Master. He was trying without success to wrestle him to the ground and earning a black eye for his efforts. “Master” he said, “I beg you, you will be free soon.”

Gabriel stopped tapping the flashlight against his teeth, listening.  The vampire, a bit over one hundred years Gabe thought, a lumbering suck-up. He would have done wonderfully in a properly bureaucratic coven.

“The Harvest.” The Master’s voice was a bare whisper. “The Harvest,” he repeated.

“Three weeks, Master.”

The two fell silent, clutching each other and for a moment Gabriel was tempted to walk over and ask how exactly the Master planned to escape. He could stroll through as if he were lost and required directions. Not that his clothing said ‘tourist’ but who could tell with tourists? Gabriel waited for a moment, hoping that the two would go on, that one of the other Vampires might contribute an obvious statement. The conversation shifted to houseplants. “Remember your favorite plant Master, we can water it today.”

“Audrey?”

“Yes Master, we will bring in a nice human, crush him, and water it. You love that.” The Master seemed to calm himself and go limp in the younger Vampire’s arms. Closing the compass, Gabriel brushed the space time bubble with his fingertips one last time before leaving. The bubble yielded, as bubbles do, distorting under the weight of his fingers. “He’s here” the Master gasped “Here’s here.” The younger vampire rolled his eyes.


	8. AT THE POLICE STATION

“Sweet Jesus Gabe, sit down. Can you do something about, about this?” the Chief waved his fingers in the air around his head “We don’t have any budget, though” he paused “I have no idea how we’d pay you.”

Gabe was looking at the Chief. Anand looked at Gabe. That sense of reassurance again. The Chief resisted, mustering up his best suspicious look, and then collapsed like an overcooked flan.

“You really can do this? You want to do this?” the Chief looked at the ceiling and back down again “No harm in trying, this place it’s…” he pressed both of his index fingers to a spot between his eyebrows “ We don’t make much progress. It’s all pretty disorderly. I think maybe, except for Anand, we’re kinda backwoods. Most of us are from Sunnydale, born and raised. Not that Sunnydale is a backwoods but you know what I mean.”

Anand leaned back in his chair and placed his hands on his stomach, glad that the conversation was going well and wary of Gabe’s charm. We slowly rotated the chair left and then right, from the Chief to Gabe and then back to the Chief as he considered  Gabe’s position. Was it wise to let him into the Police Station? Anand was not so sure.

Gabe had been very convincing that morning, completely unsurprised when Anand knocked on his door and asked about Molly Malone and the six spools of cable. Anand could not recall Gabe’s explanation, exactly, but Gabe had invited him in and offered him coffee in a living room that seemed much more cluttered and lived in than it had during Anand’s own walkthrough two days earlier. Jeb called that morning. Don said that Molly was up and about. She seemed completely fine barring a sudden interest in wooden stakes. Anand had called Molly and she said that Gabe was a perfect gentleman and she couldn’t recall why exactly she blacked out like that. Yes, Don had been telling her to get a checkup or a brain scan but really she felt fine. Out of this world good. She was liable to tire Don out with all of her new energy she said, and then she gave a throaty “Heh, heh, heh,” and Anand excused himself and set the phone into the receiver cradle. He’d walked back to Gabe’s house as much out of a feeling of guilt as any other emotion and he’d allowed Gabe to come with him to the station to see the chief. Now the chief was talking about pay constraints and the paperwork for consultants and Gabe was asking about estimated incident rates and whether they wanted incidents mapped by location the same way that New York was using geographic information systems to deal with its own crime problem.  Gabe had rolled his chair directly up the Chief’s desk as he asked these questions and the Chief leaned forward when Gabe pressed his index finger into the top of the Chief’s desk. Neither of the two were looking at Anand anymore and Anand felt free to daydream. Gabe had said something about community security for the cable. The cable was part of some new information hub. The six spools were for some sort of test platform. It all seemed to make so much sense at the time. He’d ask Gabe again when they got the chance. There would be chances. They would be working together on the new project. Anand would be the test bunny for the user interface. As the senior most officer, the detective could dictate the system reports.

“Anand, where are the worst places in town?”

Anand startled. The chief cut in “Well, the bodies are spread out but lots of people disappear from the area around that club near the railroad tracks.”

“The Bronze” said Anand

“Yeah, that’s the club.”

 “Can we take a tour?” asked Gabe.

“Now?”

“This evening, after your shift.”

Anand leaned back in his chair. “I don’t see why not.”

“Sure,” said the Chief.

At that moment one of the manila folders resting on the top of the Chiefs filing cabinet worked its way free and threw itself on the floor with a loud thump. The other manila folders watched, envious.

 

“Now, don’t have any worries. This place is not so bad as Chicago.” Anand said this as he leaned backward and twisted the steering wheel, crunching his car into a gravel parking lot near the railroad tracks. “It’s Sunnydale, not Cabrini-Green.”

“Well, it’s smaller.”

Sunnydale’s toughest neighborhood was tiny, barely a few warehouses and maybe five blocks of interconnected alleyways, all gloomy in the early evening. Gabe watched the sidewalk lamps crackle and snap themselves on, casting a yellow light that made the parking lot gravel and the nearby warehouses look jaundiced.

Detective Chandrasekaran showed no tension but he was careful to lock his car and check his weapon before inviting Gabe to take a stroll across the parking lot and into the half lit street beyond. He’d spent part of the drive over describing Chicago as a hysterically violent, dangerous city that made Sunnydale look like a convent devoted entirely to timid nuns.

As Gabe walked, he idly scanned the houses and looked into the storefront windows: PetSecure, the Iberia Travel Company, The Cambridge Bookseller, KeyMaster. Rhonda’s Antiques had a big window display featuring a stuffed animal tea party in wicker chairs. The chairs made each of the animals look small and they were clearly struggling to reach the table. One of the animals, a March Hare, was tastefully taxidermied where the others were simpler rag dolls. The Sunnydale Diner, said Anand, was two blocks up, at the intersection of State and Tracy streets. The Bronze was on Tracy and Anand waved to the doorman and walked in.

“Chandra, this is a coffee shop.”

“No, no, they serve beer. And look, a pool table.”

“A pool table is your idea of a high crime district here. I agree about Chicago.”

“That’s why it’s such a mystery. This is as bad as it gets.”

“There has to be some worse place than this. I barely drink and I’m feeling out of place here.”

Anand thought for a moment. Behind him, the cue ball clacked into the three and the six which rolled its way into a corner pocket. Two college students slapped hands, high then low. It was not clear who they were competing against.

“There’s Willy’s.”

“Willys?”

“Older crowd.” Anand looked apologetic “Really, most of our problems seem to start on this block. Willy’s is on 8th. You might want to come back and take a look at this place when school is in session.”

“Wait,” said Gabe “I see something.”

“What?,” Anand’s hand drifted to his holster as he looked around quickly.

“Nothing.”

“What was it?”

“I thought I saw some seniors quilting.”

Anand looked at Gabe sourly. Gabe shrugged “Illegal stich patterns. It’s like a gateway drug.”

 

Willy’s was truly seedy and Gabe had the distinct impression that neither he nor Anand were welcome. Maybe it was the scowls that greeted them whenever someone looked up from their drink. The lighting was abysmal. Someone had tacked a Sunnydale Police Force Bake Sale poster to the dart board. Apparently the cupcake image was the bullseye, with extra points for landing a dart in either of the letter O’s. anad glanced at the dartboard and sighed while Gabe cheerfully pulled a stool up to the bar.   
“So no problems here.”

“They look tough but we’ve never had a body here an d we’ve never had a ‘last seen’ at Willy’s.”

“They don’t love you do they?”

“Because I’ve given them traffic tickets.’ Anand gestured toward a grizzled biker at the far table. The biker was wearing a big leather jacket despite the the heat in the bar. The jacket had an AK-47 patch sewn into each of its lapels.

“See that guy?”

“Yeah.”

“I cited his cousin for graffiti at this time two years ago. His cousin ended up doing 200 hours of community service. That kid’s mom forced our biker friend to drop his cousin off and pick him up each day from the volunteer center. He hasn’t forgiven me.”

“For the drop offs?”

“The woman who runs the volunteer center is a real hard-ass. She wouldn’t allow him to use the motorcycle for drop-offs so he was forced to borrow his mom’s Chevette.”

“Chevette?”

“He’s had back pain ever since. He’s decided to blame more for the back pain.”

Gabe asked the bartender for Tequila. He changed his order as the bartender gave him a sour look and reached for the shelf.

“No, wait, what’s that, on the other end of the bar, I’ll have that?”

“This?” The bartender walked over and gestured at a bottle of Jameson.

“No, that, the no label bottle.”

“That?” The temperature in the bar fell by five degrees. He nodded.

“That.”

The bartender made a face “It’s cherry syrup, not even alcoholic. It shouldn’t be on the bar.”

“I’ll have that.”

“Cherry syrup?”

“Okay, yeah, I’ll have the cherry syrup.”

“What kind of fruitcake are you?” A beefy dockworker next to Gabe looked at him and then glanced past him to Anand. “Detective, are you trying to set something up. Like where we beat the crap out of your friend.” He had a slight accent, maybe Polish or Czech. Gabe had a moment of nostalgia for Prague.

Anand stood to step around Gabe toward the dockworker. The man’s face was shiny and when he blinked Gabe read two rough tattoos on his eyelids. The right eyelid said “Git Er Done.” The other said “Got Er Did.” Gabe smiled. “Just fucking with you,” he said. The dockworker frowned, unsure of whether he was being insulted. He leaned forward toward Gabe and stopped, staring. The blood drained from his face and he crossed himself and stood up from the stool, turning to walk to a nearby table. Anand noticed that his knees were shaking. Anand looked at Gabe, suspicious.   
“What, late stage alcoholism does that.”

“To your hands, not your knees.”

“Everyone’s different. I’ll have the tequila. A whiskey for the detective.”

 

Gabe and Anand spent the next three hours at Willy’s and Anand was distinctly drunk when they left. Loretta would kill him.

“What time is it?”

Gabe looked at his watch “Ten-thirty”

“Loretta will kill me.” A big hiccup swelled in his throat and turned into a belch “I shouldn’t drive.”

“Why?”

“We can push the car.” This sounded like a perfectly good idea to Anand. “There’s not that much traffic.”

“Let’s find the parking lot first.”

They turned left and walked away from Willy’s and then left again through a narrow alleyway. Anand bent over and breathed out, his hands at his knees.

“Are you okay?”

“What did they put in that Whiskey? I’ve never been this drunk since Chennai.”

A piece of gravel whistled over Anand’s head. A second one pinged off of the metal warehouse siding. Gabe looked up from Anand and Anand craned his head to the side. Five adult males, three Caucasian, one Asian and one African American had spread them across the alleayway entrance toward Willy’s. Anand could hear their boots scuffling at the rgound. Three of the men carried bats. He reached for his gun but Gabe told him to wait and placed a reassuring hand on his arm. Still resting his hands on his knees, Anand twisted the other way and saw a second group of four then five people blocking the far end of the alley. To his left he heard a tuneless whistle. On cue, both groups began their approach. They seemed practiced, thought Anand, as if they had once attended gang fight finishing school. He tried to stand, felt woozy, and leaned against the wall in a half crouch. He felt the pressure of Gabe’s hand on his shoulder and relaxed. Where was he again? He was ringside, there was cheering, he was in his parent’s home in Adyar, eating Appam over the breakfast table. This kitchen was bright green and the fan clacked its way through the summer heat. His mother was asking whether he wanted idli. He hadn’t eaten idli in such a long time. “You’re feverish today,” his mother said, I’ve prepared a bed in the kitchen. Fresh sheets, very white. You lie down and then eat. Masi is out but she will be back. I am going to the market. Stay out of the pantry.” The stone floor was  clean, all of the morning dust had been brushed away with the rushes. On the floor by the kitchen table, queen sized four post bed with white sheets taken from the Four Seasons along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. He’d stayed there with his first wife for their honeymoon. No travel but the best hotel that they could afford in Chicago.

Gabe eased Detective Chandrasekaran to the pavement, grabbed a trash can lid, and placed it under his head. The detective was smiling and Gabe had no idea what he might be dreaming about. The ten vampires stopped and watched this, the tuneless whistle dying out, ineffective.

Gabe straightened up. Were ten vampires really going to try and jump him? This was half of Willy’s bar maybe. Would the rest join in? Gabe smiled. He wondered what the bartender had added to their drinks. Something to increase the blood pressure maybe, something to make that first bite more rewarding. He couldn’t share Anand’s reaction. Alcohol lacked any particular flavor for him and his cultivated fondness for beer centered more on the carbonation than the taste. This was one of the best things about the twentieth century. The beer was so much more airy and carbonated.

One of the Vampires picked up a rock and threw it hard at Gabe as if he were trying to shoo a dog. The rock curved right and shot into the warehouse, punching through the siding. Gabe looked confused. Were they really going to try.

‘Hey,” he said. The vampires stopped.

“Can any of you tell me about this harvest thing?”

The Vampires looked at each other.

“Get him” said the lead Vampire.

Quicker than cats the Vampires closed the last meters. ‘Well,’ Gabriel thought ‘Maybe Willy will tell me.’

 

Four blocks away Xander Harris was teaching himself to ride a skateboard. The skateboard was on loan from his cousin and had tiny wheels and a drawing of Gene Simmons’ face on the underside of the deck. Gene’s tongue was sticking out to his chin which, like the rest of the face, was covered in white greasepaint. The artist had helpfully drawn out the word KISS in big spikey lettering under Gene’s chin only Xander’s cousin had worn away most of the top of each letter so the word looked more like ݚݚ٨١  which meant little in English but could be read 81 dal dal in Arabic. Xander could make it from one side of the asphalt parking area to the other but managed to get jammed up each time he tried to turn. When he stumbled, he walked back to the top of the sloping handicap access ramp and tried again. Devon had started skating to school that spring. High school seemed like a good target. Far away though. Willow had called him but he was too embarrassed to let anyone watch him practice.

He walked to the top of the ramp. Which time was the charm? The third time had passed long ago. He stepped on the board and rocked back and forth, facing the park and looking down the handicapped access ramp as he gripped the handrail. From this position, he watched as a ball of blue flame licked the top of the treeline, rolled into the sky and disappeared without a trace. “Woah,” he said and then the skateboard shot out from under his feet and he crashed to his knees. He heard a crunch of metal as a car plowed into a tree across the street. Dazed, a college student stepped out, looking up at the sky.

 

The bar was empty and Willy was crouching under the counter when Gabe walked back in. Gabe could see little piles of glitter dust at the tables and several of the liquor bottles had shattered on the floor. He cursed himself for not being more careful. He’d meant to stun the vampires and then ask questions but it looked like he’d applied too much pressure. Maybe he was getting old. Walking back to the bar he’d spotted a confused vampire stumbling out of an alleyway past the warehouses so he was sure that his kill radius was no more than a block. Shocking for Willy though. There’d been some concussive force as well and now both warehouses were slightly dented, curved as if a giant had hammered each side on a mandrel.

“Hey,”

“You’re back.” Willy did not sound surprised ‘Where is your friend? I knew you were bad news. What the fuck happened to my clients? No, wait, don’t tell me.” Willy remained face down under the bar, trembling, slightly. Was it possible to tremble in a resigned way?

“Detective Chandrasekaran is asleep, very comfortable. Do you know anything about this Harvest.”

“Yeah, a couple a guys were in here talking about it. I get lots of shop talk in this bar.”

Gabriel pulled himself up to the bar. “Okay, I’ll tell you what. I’ll order another Tequila and you tell me.”

“You order the good tequila then.”

“Why?”

“How am I gonna stay in business? Do you know what sort of tab I had running with my customers?”

“Tab?”

“You should’ve come on a weekend. What are you doing here tonight? These were my regulars, man, they all owed me money.”


	9. HISTORICAL NOTE ABOUT HEAVEN AND HELL

What humanity understands as the Fall was actually the first Reorganization and Retrenchment.

Project UNIVERSE was in the final stages of beta testing when a layer of Angelic middle managers who had at one point been intimately involved in working out the mechanics of separating the stars in the sky and separating water from earth began to worry incessantly about pending unemployment. Several of these middle management Angels got together and decided to unionize and Lucifer was voted spokesperson. The concept was a cards-and-drinking sort of concept but soon after the first flier went up, maybe a third to a half of the heavenly host found the means to pay dues and suddenly the Angelic Upper management found itself facing the largest and most comprehensive sit down strike in the entire history of Time .  The Archangels in charge of UNIVERSE reassured the middle managers that there were post-launch plans in place and that UNIVERSE 2.0 was already in planning and that anyone who was redundant would be retrained and the Union agreed to finish work. A week to the day after the completion and launch of UNIVERSE, the Archangels sat Lucifer and his friends down and gave them a choice: Earth- which was basically a pool of mud and protozoa- or the Center of the Sun. Lucifer responded by leading a union strike and was firmly retrenched to the center of the sun. Workers found participating in spot slowdowns or theft of office items were sent to Earth.

The first reorganization marked the beginning of the long period of Old-School management, based entirely on dire threats devised by the Archangels and delivered by the Seraphim, who loved their positions in an immense, unhealthy way. The earth and the sun were left to their own devices until the Launch of Earth V 2.0 when the Dinosaurs were wiped out and when the earthbound Middle Management Angels, who had taken on a variety of demonic aspects, were re-located to the center of the sun. The Seraphim were told to “spruce the place up a bit” and a garden of Eden was created.

To this day, there are middle management angles in heaven who feel that the whole thing was handled badly. The Archangels, for the record, agree. One of the outcomes of the 3rd Great Reorganization was a new focus on friendlier management techniques. This involved, among other things,  forcing large sections of the Angelic host into therapy


	10. SUNNYDALE EXAMINER ANNOUNCEMENT

 

 

Front Page, Block Lettering. Left hand column:

SUMMER BREAK ENDS WELCOME BACK CLASS OF 1997.

Classes start next Monday. Go Razorbacks!  


	11. REGINALD MOSELY

Reginald pressed his shoulders into the backrest along a park bench, relaxed and in his own head slightly dramatic. As he leaned he draped his arm along the top rail, his fingers just below the faint line where Katarina Hasselbeck’s bra clasped below her blouse. He loved maintaining a zero state, a point of equilibrium where anything could happen. Strength was easy. He was a wide receiver on the Sunnydale High School football team. He could afford to project a mild, enamoured defencelessness and Katarina, a sophomore member of the cheerleading squad and student council member, was beautiful enough to make defencelessness easy. “I am utterly captivated by you,” he repeated to himself, “totally here for you. You are the most important person in the world tonight. There is absolutely nobody else.” He whispered these lines in his head until he felt the stir of actual emotion. Katarina sat upright, shoulders back, hands in her lap. She projected coyness and cuteness. This was a perfect silent movie conversation. Reginald looked at her and then grasped the back of the bench and slid closer.

“Thanks for coming out,” he said, “this is great.” He’d made it through an interminable dinner with three of her friends, one member of the football team and a –what?—a seventh wheel who was also on the student council and clearly infatuated with  Katarina. She turned toward him and he leaned forward and her shoulder, clear with three freckles, pressed into his polo shirt, defining a space just below his collarbone. She looked up at him. He could feel the breath mints jostling in his back pocket as he leaned forward and kissed her. Two weeks. He’d been arranging this for two weeks, calling her just before the start of the fall semester. He’d been nervous when he’d called her. He wasn’t any good on the phone but scraped through and then things moved forward naturally. She knew that he had broken up with Jennifer. It just… hadn’t worked out he said. But that was the point of high school. To take risks, to get a bit of heartbreak. She’d responded well to that speech on their first date. And now a second, and a dinner where he proved that he could get along with her friends and now this.

Katerina froze. Reginald kept his left hand under the nape of her neck but loosened his elbow and drew his right hand back from the ribcage of her cotton undershirt. He looked at her but she was looking past him at the graveyard. She looked alarmed.

“Baby, what?” It was safe to call her baby. He glanced down the front of her blouse and then stared at her face, trying to catch her eyes but she was fixed on the graveyard. She didn’t realize maybe that they were no longer kissing.

“What is it?” Reginald sounded annoyed and followed her gaze back.

There was an angel in the graveyard. A tall, shaggy haired guy in jeans with a cheap white shirt torn across his wings, obscuring the point where they met his back. The wings were living, not mechanical. Mechanical objects did not twitch like that.  Mechanical objects did not contract and convulsively extend for two meters in each direction. How did he support that weight? How much did they even weigh? And what was up with that glow?

The Angel Gabriel stood up on his toes, bounced twice on the balls of his feet and launched skyward leaving only an afterimage in Reginald’s retinas. As he launched, a big cloud of glitter blew out of the bushes behind the park bench, covering Reginald and Katerina in a layer of refractive dust. Reginald held her tight for a moment and then stared into her eyes. Her pupils dilated and his eyes defocused. After a moment his own eyes defocused as well.

“That was—“

“Pretty cool baby.” He finished her sentence. Both of them breathless.

Sensing some tragedy, a nearby group of vampires gave them wide birth, leaving them in peace to neck under a clear sky.

 

 

From his vantage point above the Erikson Cemetery, Gabriel could see the faint outline of the houses that demarcated the break between the town proper and the farmland that was more properly in Santa Cruz. Beyond this he could see the crash of the Pacific surf and closer in the winking lights as hundreds of cars raced their way along Route 1 to the West of Sunnydale and Route 101 to the East. A faint, shimmering dome stretched between these two highways. It absorbed the color of the car headlights and the sodium streetamps, covering the town in a faint amber gloss. Sunydale residents lived within this dome, woke in it, went to sleep in it, studied in it, worked, at and conceived children in it. To Gabriel, it shimmered the way that the air above a parking lot might shimmer on a hot summer day. To the Sunnydale residents it was invisible.

 

Gabriel flapped his wings, once, twice. The cool evening air lofted his feathers and allowed him to pick up the scent of wheat fields and grape arbors beyond the amber boundary. He turned slowly, tracing the edge of the dome. It was inexact, running in and out of the surrounding forests and farmland, but it took on the shape of the town, possibly allowing for new homes. It was hard to tell what is was, exactly, or why it was in place. When you build a piece of angelic switchgear, you naturally place a small protective field about it. No use allowing the outside world, whether leaves, insects, dinosaurs or people, to wander into the electronics. That shield, however, was supposed to be five, maybe six cubic meters larger than the gearing itself. Had it expanded to cover the entire valley, then the town would never have been established. It would sit even as a blank spot on any map. Instead, it seemed as if this field was built to attract people, to keep them from leaving even while vampires fed on the populace. It was, Gabriel thought, a uniquely powerful and subtle thing, beyond the capacity of any vampire. An old demon might have been able to make it—Jakan might have been able to make it before he went insane on earth and was sent to the center of the sun. One of the Seraphim might have been able to make it. Jesus himself could’ve done it with enough time and the proper manuals, but why? It seemed like a great deal of effort. Gabriel would need to a security layer refresher course in order to take it apart.

 

If the honeytrap over Sunnydale was going to prove tricky, the more immediate vampire problem promised to be easy. The timing, thought Gabriel, was stellar. Gabriel had been in Sunnydale only three months and now, at the end of the first week of the school year his target was going to escape the switch and save him months of trouble. An inter-vampire energy transfer channel. How the hell did the vampires know how to do that? And such a stupid, cryptic way of doing it. Someone had clearly been feeding them information. With any luck, the Master was going escape by midnight, leaving Gabriel free to close off the switch and set about repairs. The slayer, he thought, could handle the Master. He’d seen her heading to school with her mother. She was green but strong enough. He might even be a good meal for her. The idea gave him a hint of nausea. He’d taste like sour wheatabix. What happened to the four course meals a few millennia ago?

Slowly, silently, he drifted down to the rooftop of the Bronze. He’d set up a small [repel] field in order to prevent the slayer from interfering with the energy transfer and then, after the clown of an old vampire rose, he’d click off the switch and leave her to her work while he got on with the switch. Maybe he’d even check in after a few hours to see how she was doing.

 

A light rain began to blow in from the coast and an old Patsy Cline song started up at the diner on Beaumont street. One of those booth-top jukeboxes. Only three of the tables had them. There was a fourth jukebox at the end of the rail. Gabriel  had never listened to much country music and he wished that he’d had a cowboy hat to tip back. It would give him the posture of a man getting ready to go to work. Instead he tipped an imaginary cowboy hat back, picked up a small piece of rebar and began to scratch a command prompt window into the steel siding near the Bronze’s roofline. He was shuffling around like this when he was lifted from the ground by two goons and thrown into the back of a glistening white Angelic Astro-van. 


	12. GORENG THE DANGEROUS

“Crap,” they have him.

“What do you mean?”

“They threw him in the van” muffled, heavy breathing. The mobile console crackled, incessant scratching

“Did he make contact?”

“No, they got him right outside of the diner, I was watching, I followed him from the diner”

“Okay, get back here, we got a shipment”

“You mean?”

“Four tons of hamburger and a 2000 lb freezer chest filled with steak, we diverted a lorry, only one this week. We can figure this out after dinner.”

-click-


	13. THE AD AGENCY

“Tap Tap”

Someone with wings was saying this. Each time he said it, he’d press the eraser end of a pencil into Gabriel’s head

“Tap”

“Do you need to say that?’

“Yes… tap… you…are…Gabriel…right?” Each word accented with a hard prod.

Gabriel’s arms were tied to a chair. He tried rocking the chair. Bolted to the white carpet. The surrounding walls were white, as was the chair.

“Where am I, why is everything white?’

The angel with the pencil paused and looked apologetic

“Well, we just built it this morning…it’s a bit of a temporary thing… you can’t go back into heaven right?”

“Where am I?”

“Los Angeles, Hollywood.. movie set”

“What?”

Another angel approached from the left “It’s a movie set, props mostly. That’s a diffuser screen behind you”

Gabriel rocked in the chair

“The chair, bolts and ropes are from heaven, though…didn’t want you escaping”

“The van?”

“Loaner...we spray painted it”

Gabriel looked at the pencil angel, who was sitting in front of him, knee to knee, chewing on the eraser. He leaned forward and made to prod him in the head again. Gabriel could see the spit glistening on the metal ferrule.

“You were screwing with the switch. What…the…hell… are…you…planning?” A jab between each word

Gabriel could feel the eraser ferrule wedging a ring into his forehead. He lunged forward against the ropes.

A third angel appeared behind the first. Hands up.

“So, ah, we want to help you out here”

“What?”

“Your fifteen minutes were up roughly, what, two thousand years ago right? Well, it looks like heaven needs you and so someone sent us down to …you know…collect”

“What?”

“Collect you mostly” The pencil Angel leaned back and pressed his fingers to his temples.

“Honestly, it pains me... someone from upstairs received a  special circumstances permit from someone else upstairs. And who knows why but you are apparently to be involved in a special project. I heard that it was a board-level request”

“Special project? What? The switch is busted. I need to fix that you jackasses.”

Movie prop angel jerked on the ropes, as if they could be tightened. “We don't know, have, uhh, no idea why you are going back. We have just been sent to collect you see, and to take you to the movie set and to await further instructions. And you are not allowed to escape”

“When are they going to come”

“I don't know, once the one of the Seraphim come back from lunch.”

“Wait, why the Seraphim. You are hand delivering notes?”

“E-mail's broken”

“And the movie set?”

“The Seraphim insist on it. It is part of a new marketing plan. Want to combine interdepartmental messages and a new corporate branding effort. Trying things out in house first. Who is going to fight with them right now?”

The three continued to polish the set and test the electrical connects until the kidnap-in-Los Angeles Seraphim arrived with a resounding blatt and a puff of smoke. It was visibly disgruntled. Angel number three turned off the fog machine immediately.

“This...this is it?”

“Well...”

“My entrance!” It wailed, looking aggrieved and winding an airplane napkin between its fingers

“Uhh”

“Do you know...do you know how long it has been since Seraphim have delivered a message on this planet? A message anywhere even remotely classifiably near humanity?”

It's voice rose.

“One hundred and sixty nine...fucking...years! The department was planning this entrance for the past five days. Where were the bands we ordered. Where was the ostrich and the elephants. Hell, why isn't anyone doing the march we choreographed”

The pencil angel stood up. “We were told LA, white movie set, nothing else. We captured him. All that you need...to...do...is...deliver”

“The regional manger is going to hear about this...” The Seraphim paused and turned around with a twitchy smile. “I'll have you chasing down lending library delinquents for the next three centuries” And with that it strode forward, produced a golden cudgel from between its back wings, swung once and brought it crashing down between Gabriel’s eyebrows. 

Smack!

“Augh!”

The Seraphim grinned evilly and unscrewed a cap on top of the cudgel, drawing out a long piece of parchment which it unrolled and proceeded to read in ringing tones

“TO: THE ANGEL GABRIEL

WE HAVE BEEN INFORMED OF YOUR APPEARANCE AND OF THE DAMAGE TO THE HS7 SWITCH. YOU ARE HEREBY INFORMED THAT AN INVESTIGATION INTO YOUR ROLE IN ANY DAMAGE TO SAID SWTICH HAS BEEN LAUNCHED. IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY ATTEMPTING TO BREAK THE SWITCH YOU SHOULD STOP NOW. IF YOU ARE NOT CURRENTLY TRYING TO BREAK THE SWITCH THEN YOU SHOULD GET OFF OF YOUR ASS AND REPAIR IT. WE (the Seraphim was booming now, Signing in a pitchy Broadway contralto) HAD A DEAL. SIGNED JESUS H CHRIST”

The Seraphim rolled up the parchment and turned to the other Angels.

“Okay, that’s it. Let him go. We need to talk about this crap movie set when you get back”

“Wait, what… that was it?” Angels one two and three stood in a group support semicircle looking shocked and aggrieved. “He was supposed to go back!” Angel one’s voice rose “He’s been appearing in front of humans… he’s, he’s not cleaning up the vampire mess… he’s… bought real estate without heavenly permission!”

The Seraphim rolled his eyes and unrolled the parchment again. He scanned it once more before rolling it back up and sliding it neatly into the golden screwcap cudgel.

“Nothing here. Tough. Not our problem. Are you in enforcement? No, you’re not. Let him go”

“But he was supposed to be transported!” Wailed angel number two. “We even painted the van white”

Thwack! Now Angel two was rubbing his head

“And a shitty paint job as well. You caught him and brought him here. I read the message. No transport command forthcoming. We are done” He disappeared with a thunderous fartlike blat. The angels looked at Gabriel, who was still tied to a chair.

“Um… okay… Arp 148, drag his chair over to the corner”

The third movie prop angel unbolted Gabriel’s chair and dragged it backward, screeching against the cement floor while Gabriel fought against the ropes. He leaned chair plus Gabriel against a wall and then helped the other two angels load the movie set back into the van.

“Hey assholes, untie me!”

The first movie prop Angel looked over as he lugged a carpet in the van.

“Seraphim said it... uuf… we did our jobs. Delivery only, nothing about return.” And, slamming the van doors, the Angels peeled out of the studio bay in Los Angeles as Gabriel clattered to the floor and flopped around, inchworm style, under the halogen lamps.


	14. ANAND CHANDRASEKARAN

Gabriel might be morose and refuse to answer his questions and Gabriel might snap at him and avoid Loretta, but Anand had a town to protect, dysfunctional network engineers and shitty police force be damned.

He had glanced, guilty, at the Ganesha statue in his foyer as he dragged an armful of wooden crosses to the back seat of his car. Now the crosses were clinking against the bottles of holy water that he had ordered from a supply house in LA. There was a catholic gift shop downtown that sold holy water in little plastic squeezer bottles and he’d bought a few but he couldn’t bring himself to buy out the entire store and anyway, other folks were sure to need the water. He had purchased a crucifix for Loretta though and she thought it was nice and surprising that he had bought it and they’d had an argument when he insisted that she wear it at all times. “Wait honey,” he’d said, “100% I am not converting anything anywhere.” He showed her the photo of Sai Baba, who’s smiling face looked like a 1970’s Henson-era Muppet.  “Look, here is the Sai Baba photo, here is the Ganesha, bowl of jasmine, photos of my parents. Everything is the same.”

“Then honey why are you asking me to wear this...”

“No no, I am not asking. You must wear this. I love you and I am very worried and yes, wear that, and carry this holy water also. You need to do this for protection”

“Anand…”

“And also, don’t invite people in the house after dark.”

“Anand, you are telling me that there is a rogue catholic militia and I am in danger and you aren’t going to tell anyone else, just me.”

“Right”

“ And I need crosses and holy water to protect myself”

“Right”

“Because holy water stops bullets?”

“Right, no, wait, wrong honey, not bullets. These guys are dangerous”

“Anand, stop bullshitting me.”

 “Honey, we are very close. I am not supposed to tell even you. It is all very secret. Their leader is coming to town. Two weeks only I need you to wear this….”

He’d tell her something else in another two weeks, and then something again two weeks later. He was looking at real estate prices in San Jose.

 

He’d passed out in that alleyway expecting a one way trip to the hospital only to wake the next morning in his own house. While asleep he had dreamed that he met a younger version of himself, bright red, made entirely of churning blood cells. It may have spoken to him. He recalled asking it questions but he couldn’t recall the nature of questions or whether his second body had provided any answers. In the dream, he had seen a pool of blood on a chair in an otherwise empty room at the Ajax bus station on the north side of Chennai. Outside in the half light, the air seemed very still and the trains seemed far away. When he approached the pool of blood it has moved, folding over itself and growing until it assumed his form. Waking, Anand had no idea what this meant.

 

He didn’t bother relaying the dream to Gabriel. While not exactly dismissive, Gabriel told him that he’d been very drunk, surprisingly drunk and that it was only two guys in the alleyway and that they hadn’t been threatening anyone. Describing the event, his voice was very calm and Anand had the sensation of a warm pillow pressed softly and then more firmly between his ears.

“And so I handed you off to Loretta.”

“Just handed me off?”

“You walked in and waved to her and then you sat down on the edge of your fold out bed in the front room and then went to sleep. Loretta slid a pillow under your head. I told her that we’d had a few too many drinks.”

“You told her?” Loretta hadn’t said anything to him when he woke but she had little sympathy for his blinding, thirty-minute headache. 

“No choice.” Gabe stood up to leave.

“Wait, wait” Anand waved his hand as if he were signaling a waiter from the security of his porch. “There’s something else.”

“What?” 

I woke up early this morning, when it was still dark. I had that headache from the whiskey and so I took water and bread from the kitchen and I say on th front porch for a few minutes trying to absorb any extra alcohol.”

“And?”

“And I saw this guy walk down the street, big leather jacket with a flaming skull stitched into the back. He was wearing boots, quite tall. Cocky.”

“Cocky?”

“He was walking like he owned the town. Not slow, not fast. He was surveying each of the houses as he walked down the center of the street.”

“Some kid?”

“Older than a kid. Too big for a high schooler or a college student. Old guys get that walk.” Anand held his arms on either side and shuffled them forward to demonstrate.

“Okay.”

“Anyway,” Anand hesitated before plunging in, “Anyway, this guy. He wasn’t human”

“What do you mean?” Gabe sat back down. Anand listened to the board above the top step of the porch creak under his weight. “You mean as a metaphor.”

“No, I mean for real. Gabe, I’ve been a detective for over twenty years. Chicago and now here. I have seen every type of person, male female, kid, adult, grandparent, every type of person and I’ve seen lots of dead people, for better or worse but until last night I’ve never once seen a dead person.”

“How did you know that they were dead?”

Anand looked at Gabe “You don’t sound at all surprised by this.”

“How did you know that they were dead?”

“You can just tell. Your brain wants to play tricks, right. He’s walking so I say to myself no, he can’t be dead. This bhenchod is still alive but then I keep watching him and every instinct that I have tells me that he is actually dead.”

“What did you do?”

“I wanted to leave the porch, right, tell him to stop, go down and check him but I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place. My heart was pounding like crazy. It was like this until he disappeared at the end of the street. My heart unclenched and I went inside. I was planning to call the police but I had also the sense that I should not do this. It is hard to explain.”

“Why are you telling me this.” Gabe frowned, “It sounds a little crazy.”

“Because you give me that same sense.” As soon as he said this, Anand regretted it. Why was he dragging a new next door neighbor into a crazy conversation? He looked over at Gabe, who was watching him. He had the sense of a cell sample under the slide and the dream with the room came back strongly to him.

“What?”

Gabe was silent for a moment, watching him. He leaned back, bracing himself against the porch floor with his hands. Somewhere an Ice cream truck rattled to life. The jingle started as soon as the engine turned over. Was it true that Ice Cream trucks used different jingles depending on the ice cream supplier? Anand wasn't sure.

“It’s frustrating,” Gabriel said after a moment.

“What’s frustrating?”

“This.” Gabe grabbed Anand’s forearm near the elbow. As soon as he did this, Anand’s memory became foggy. Part of his brain seemed to stretch and relax, letting memory slip from its grasp. Anand jerked his arm back.

“Bhenchod, what are you doing?”

“ _Chutya_ ,” Said Gabe “How do you say, _Piratipatam tīrttal_ , remove memory-- only,” he said slowly “it doesn’t work. It is frustrating that it doesn’t work.”

“How do you do that? When did you learn Tamil words?”

“So I need to figure out how much to disclose,” Gabe said, ignoring Ananad’s question.

 

In the end, they spent another two hours on the porch. Gabe told Anand that vampires existed and that he was an angel sent to clean up the town. Sent sounded so much better to Gabe than kidnapped. There was no point in going into the details of the switch. Anand found all of this strangely believable and he was upset with himself for missing the vampires who were surely responsible for the town’s murder rate. Did Ananad have superpowers now? Not really. Who else knew? Gabe wasn’t sure. In Gabe’s view, the vampires were pretty weak. Stronger than humans but pretty weak. How could Anand kill them? With the regular vampire killing tools. They would be tougher than the average idiot that Anand saw in Chicago but it was not impossible. Anand should get his will in order. Thankfully, Anand’s will had been in order for years. Loretta would get 2/3 of his assets. The last third would be sent to Chennai in hopes of building a school. More likely the last third would end up buying some local political a Land Rover but that was fine. Anand felt introspective sitting on the porch. How many vampires were there? Several hundred, said Gabe, but he had a plan. The problem would be cleaned up in a week.

 

And now a week had passed and the Vampires were still hanging out on street corners in the evening and Gabriel was morose and refused to speak with anyone. Anand failed to find him at the Bronze all-call emergency and when the two finally met, Gabriel was slumped on the curb at his own house. He had waved Anand away and then told him that he was taking a break for a few days and then told him that “I could give a rat’s ass if everyone in this town gets bit. I need to go strangle a slayer. Crappy over enthusiastic granddaughter”

“Gabriel, what…”

Gabriel stood up “Fuck the switch. I will be back in a few days.” He walked to his front door, scrambled for his keys and then ripped the doorknob off and went inside. The door swung back open as soon as he closed it and Anand watched him slam the door finally and jam the doorknob back in its circular hole.

And so Anand was on vampire patrol, driving around at night. Worrying  about Loretta at home. Gabriel? Chunni no help jackass.

Anand checked the back seat as the crosses rolled into a small collection of animal-themed wooden knives. He had averaged only one vampire per patrol. His first vampire had been maybe 20 years old in real life and reminded Anand of the meth addicts that he had collared in Grant Park. You never went on a call like that without a partner next to you and an EMT crew on alert. The EMT crew was for the perp but your partner was there to protect you when the amphetamines drove the perp into one of those crazy bursts of strength. 25 years ago, one addict had head butted his way through the rear passenger window of his police car while he and Vijay were riding up front. The paperwork, in that case, took longer than the window repair. Vampire strength and methamphetamine strength, Anand decided, were similar.

The first vampire, for example, didn’t seem to feel any of Anand’s kicks and punches and even if he wasn’t able to throw Anand, he was able to push him back easily. He responded to the cross though, raising his arms to protect his face when Anand pulled it out from the inside of his jacket. With his free right hand, Anand lurched forward and slid an all-wood knife complete with panther etching between the vampire’s left 5th and 6th intercostals and the perp looked stupidly cow eyed for a fraction of a second before bursting into a glittery grayish dust.  The hood of Anand’s car had popped back when he walked over the gravel where the vampire had been standing. Anand could hear his own labored breathing in a way that made the fight seem loud in memory. He could see the porch lights from a house on the other side of the graveyard parking lot. It was really just like Chicago but with more grass. 

Anand had doused himself in holy water before fighting the second vampire. Nothing like seeing a 200 lb soaking wet Indian police detective running at you with a wooden knife. The second vampire,  an older female accountant, stopped in her tracks and then attacked, tripped, and fell forward on to the blade. Her skin sizzled for a fraction of a second before she burst into dust.  Twenty four hours later a third vampire approached from the rear and wrapped his arms around Anand before hitting a holy-water soaked towel that Anand had placed around his neck. The vampire shrieked in pain and stumbled backward. Anand sprayed him with one of the plastic mini-bottles and beat him around the head with the cross before stabbing him. He needed to get a heavier cross. He wondered if he could build a cross into a baseball bat. Would that even work? The rules seemed arbitrary. Loretta was asking him about the holy water smell when he came home in the morning. The water had some oil in its base that did a great job at slowing evaporation but it made Anand smell like he had been shagging the sisters of Perpetual Distemper over on Camilla hill.

Less than an hour into his latest evening patrol, Anand spotted a fifth vampire, a gangling muppet of a kid with floppy hair whose distressed leather jacket was several inches too short for his torso. He was wearing torn jeans and Anand could see a keychain glittering from one of his belt loops. The muppet was dragging an elderly woman into some bushes near the high school when Anand screeched to a stop, banging the front right tire up onto the sidewalk.  A second vampire came running toward him from the football field as soon as he left the car. “Damn” Anand thought. He had never tried to handle two vampires. You wouldn’t try to handle two meth addicts at the same time would you? Anand reached the first vampire and sprayed him with holy water from the squeeze bottle just as the second vampire bowled into him, knocking him flat on his stomach. The second vampire—and old grizzled guy in suspenders with a beard and roundish glasses— started back when he hit the holy water towel but the towel slid to a ground as Anand stood up. The elderly woman scrambled up at the same time and took off running for the sidewalk. The muppet looked after her and back at Anand. Probably this guy should be killed first. Or maybe it was better to go after the easy prey. The two of them would kill the big Indian dude first and then go hunting. Wait, then he would have to share a meal. He could feed off of the Indian guy and then the Santa Claus looking vampire could feed off of the woman. Is that impolite? What’s the etiquette? Screw it, he could apologize later. He’d only been out of the ground for an hour and he was starving. That is what he would

-Poof-

Anand saw a third vampire emerge from the school itself as the second began circling him. The panther knife had popped the first into a cloud of Fozzie dust, so Anand was able to focus on the latter two. Luckily, the muppet’s leather jacket had been open. Vampires were apparently too stupid to buy chest plates. He had the cross in one hand and a knife in the other but he had dropped the water and his towel was on the ground behind him. Three vampires on a single run? Did they work together? This was going to be a shitty night. The Santa Claus vampire’s hands sizzled as he grabbed the front of Anand’s own jacket and luffed him backward. Anand caught a spiky knot in the bushes and gasped as he went to his knees, waving the cross in front of him. The second vampire rounded from the other side of the bushes. Anand was getting stupid. He knew this is a slow motion sort of way. You get really stupid right before you get hurt. Santa Claus was in front of him and— who? –  Jimmy Carter maybe above him. Slow motion thinking. The fangs were really long. How did they close their mouths? “I’m going to get killed by Jimmy Carter.” He thought “How stupid.”

-Poof-

Dust showered down on Anand. The Santa Claus vampire looked up, shocked. Anand grabbed a suspender and pulled him down onto his knife.

-Poof-

“Hello Anand”

“Uhhh” Anand squinted “Hello Molly.”


	15. BLATTO THE NIMBLE

Three in the morning: Blatto had been running since two that afternoon and now he was dragging a mouldering leather bound text twice his own weight through a sewer tunnel in Los Angeles. Missions he had run before; missions he would run again but his sense of smell could put a bloodhound to shame and he really hated the sewers. Blatto felt that he’d spent most of the last 500 years in sewers.

Goreng sent him to Los Angeles, first to pick up a book and drag it back to headquarters and then to return to Los Angeles with the same book and push it— 3:30 AM dead drop only—through the back door slot of Decathalon books on West 3rd where Goreng assured him that others would take care of it. Blatto had chosen to double back twice as a defensive measure and then had torn the plastic book wrapper on a stray metal flange and so he had to repair it with cellotape and now he was running late. His claws skritched against the older steel walkways and the sound echoed. “Note to Self: Trim your damn toenails” he thought. He didn’t want to think of the grit that was gumming up the space between his claws and his toe pads.

The mission tempo had been increasing, which meant that something was up. Blatto thought about this as he shimmied up a ladder toward a street-level drain gate, towing the plastic pouch and book after him on a reel of climbing rope. This was the second book job in six months. He first job went directly to the Sunnydale library which was easier. He had lined it up with the other leatherbound books in a stuffed glass case marked “antiquities,” resetting the cam lock with a multitool from his leather pouch before sliding through an open window facing the parking lot.  This time, Goreng said, they would be adding instructions into one of the prophecy books that they had worked and re-worked since Sumerian times. That book was in Los Angeles. Blatto was lucky that it was in California at all. Transporting the Angel from Prauge, for example, had been a complete pain in the ass.

Goreng had sprayed food all over Blatto when he made the most recent request. This was possibly a sign of anger or simply a sign that he was eating. Goreng spent a great deal of time eating, pounding on tables, and spraying food. The single most intelligent life form on the planet, more intelligent than the Angelic Middle managers that had been sent to the sun and far more capable than the humans and human/ demon hybrids that followed,  and he couldn’t figure out a way to sink his 12-inch incisors into a side of beef without losing half of it on the floor of their cellar hideaway. He bellowed as well. A big hearty roar before dinner. Blatto suspected that Goreing missed chasing food, but this was not an option in the age of electronics and wire-guided explosives. At most they could sneak out late at night and travel to new parts of the world, leaving single footprints in badly timed earth strata in order to screw with palaeontologists. When the blood lust became too much they would rob meat processing  plants but even this was forcibly truncated with the advent of video security systems . “We have to do something soon, Goreng said “Or humans really will track us down and wipe us out.”

According to Goreng, he had developed a big big plan that involved bringing the now-demonic fallen Middle Management Angels back from the center of the sun. They had always gotten along with the demons and at any rate, the dinosaurs were now measurably stronger than the Angels who had cultured them and the hundred or so remaining dinosaurs could use a servant class. The idea of being served by Angels appealed to Goreng. It represented a perfect balance of carnivorous nature and a refined heavenly aesthetic. “I see this relationship between Dinosaurs and demoted Angels as a natural progenitor of the mythical relationships that Frazer characterized in the vegetation cycle. We more properly understand this as a directional spiral. The dissolution of humanity and our supremacy on earth offers the most natural next revolution in this spiral. Failure is…” he paused, “inconceivable” He had looked over his lectern at a warehouse full of dinosaurs who had assembled to sit groaning leather ottomans after stuffing themselves into gargantuan re-sewn turtlenecks. “That said,” he continued “Shelley can bite it… we are not planning to become lifeless things.” The best way to bring the angelic host back from the centre of the sun? Goreng suggested that the dinosaurs send a cancellation request backward in time through the Advanced Delivery system. Countermand the reorganization initiative that forced the Angels off of earth in the first place. Write from the future and declare it a bad idea. The Angels would not “return” per se. They would never leave. Then, the plan went, the dinosaurs would emerge from a time-independent safe point in the switchgear bubble. They would be at full strength, escaping the effects a recently revised past. Angels stomp on the humans. Dinosaurs stomp on the angels. Everybody ends up either happy or flat. Goreng loved stomping.

The idea appealed to the senior dinosaur council only in theory.  Several quickly pointed out that you could no longer use the Advanced Delivery system to send messages into the past. The patch was in place and Jesus was the only one with  the override. The process for overriding the patch also looked painful. Several dozen dinosaurs had watched Jesus propagate the last backward message in AD 33. An Iguanadon spoke up. “We could put up with the crucifixion part but we just don’t know enough of the background code to pull it off. Christ had a 2PFLOPS NUMA CHEETAH system spread across 6K+ blade servers churning out detailed commands in a supercooled manger outside of Jerusalem. What’s our limit? We have a single busted SPARCstation and exactly one 3D printer which can’t get the speed or symbol resolution that we’d need.”

Goreng tilted his head sideways and lowered a gigantic pair of wireframe glasses with his arm extensions. He smiled. “I have a solution. He’s right on this planet. I know that you are going to say it’s impossible but I predict that Gabriel is going to help us. He built the patch. He built the system. He’s still here. I’m certain that he built a second back door”

The entire dinosaur coven groaned and gnashed their teeth. They’d say it was impossible. Goreng would sway them. The time was—if not right then… righter. For a start, they now knew where the switchgear was. That was a serious first step.

Blatto and six other agents retrieved Gabriel from Prague a week later using an oversized tour bus purchased from a guy named Bob who had used it years earlier to haul the Monkees around during their one trip to the UK. Gabriel spent most of the trip tied to a day-glow green roof rack.


End file.
